Commonwealth & Commonwealth

Noko Marie, Continued

2008-11-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

Dear readers,
Noko Marie continues her reflections at her new blog,

The Kramer Is Now: Accidental Girl Philosopher Encounters Modern Life

Come check it out!

Oh Noes! The End of C and C?

2008-10-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,
I'm afraid it's true: this is the end of C and C. Since the Cap'n has other responsibilities these days that are incompatible with blogging, and since C and C was always meant as a joint venture, we've decided that this is a natural end.

I, Noko, plan to start up a new blog continuing my reflections soon. When I do, I'll post a link here to the new URL. That should be in about two weeks. Feel free to email me at the address on my Noko Marie profile any time for more information.

Thanks! See you all again soon!

My Rational Emotive Elephant

2008-10-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote before on C and C about women and men and rationality. I had been long puzzled, I explained, by the fact that women were taken to be less rational, when on the face of it, women are the less impulsive, less violent, more cautious of the two genders.

What I came to think, on mulling it over, I said, was that while women may be sort of a little irrational about a lot of things, a lot of the time, men are sort of really irrational about a few things -- you know, sex, money, at certain times.

I don't know if that's right. But I was thinking about it again reading this great book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesis.

Haidt says the self is like an elephant and a rider. Reason can guide your inner elephant, but only through persuasion and training, not really through force. Sometimes the rider knows what is best, but sometimes the elephant does. Haidt describes riding a horse on a scary cliff, and suddenly failing to use the reins to guide the horse at a crucial moment. He figures he's going to go over the cliff, but of course the horse doesn't want to go over the cliff either. The horse doesn't even need direction. He knows which way to go.

I like this metaphor, which seems to me to grant that neither reason nor emotion should always have the upper hand. Sometimes the rider knows what's best; sometimes the elephant does.

Now, it's tempting to say that irrationality is when the rider doesn't control the elephant. But the fact that the elephant can be right means this is too quick. Irrationality is just taking actions that don't make sense. Like steering toward the cliff. Both the rider and the elephant can have this sort of problem.

If that's right, it seems a person could be "rational" either by having a strong rider, or by just having an elephant who wants the right things.

Speaking for myself, I've never felt in much in control of my own decisions in the riderish sense. My rider is there, but he's either really weak or really gentle, as I wrote about before.

On the other hand, I think my elephant has generally good impulses. OK, sometimes he has to be guided away from overindulgence in pleasures, but other than that, he's pretty OK. I am impulsively inclined to be nice to people, to do work that is interesting and useful, to make my loved ones happy, and to keep my home tidy.

Does the fact that I am impulsively inclined to want things that are actually in my own best interest, and that I follow those impulses make me more rational or less? I don't know.

But I will say that some impulses, like the impulse to violence and rape, aren't just impulses you want to be able to control. They're impulses you don't want your elephant to have at all.

Haidt says a bit about retraining your elephant. The main thing is it takes practice. I guess this is what culture and cultural inhibitions were doing for us, before we all decided that total autonomy and chaos was the way to go.

Me, I think a little general elephant retraining might be in order for some of us.

Back On Monday

2008-10-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm a little suddenly swamped with other responsibilities, so no new C and C excitements from me 'til next week. Back on Monday!

Four Modes For The Working Woman

2008-10-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

Nobody likes to be told what to do, and nobody likes to be criticized, and nobody likes to be told that whatever they're doing isn't good enough.

Men, it seems to me, particularly hate being told these things by women.

This means that any woman who has a job that involves telling men what to do and telling them when they're not measuring up will have a much easier life if she can develop a kind of "work persona": a mode of being that is related to, but not identical to, her true self, and that taps into one of the types of women that men don't mind being pushed around by.

As I see it, there are four such modes.

1) The mom.

Obviously, one major mode of acceptable bossing around comes from mom. The mom is warm, and easy-going, and always has your best interest at heart. She's doing this for your own good, and she'll give you a teaspoon of sugar to make the medicine go down. Much as I disagree with Sarah Palin's politics, I think she's doing the "mom mode" like we've never seen it done.

2) The bitch.

You'd think being bitchy would turn people off, and sometimes it does, but sometimes it really works. I think the trick is to make people feel, yeah, you're being bitchy to them now, but some day when the stakes are big, you're going to be bitchy on their side, and then they'll be thrilled to have you in their corner. Think Hillary Clinton.

3) The dominatrix.

This isn't necessarily sexual, though it can be. The dominatrix tells you what's what, beats you up a little psychologically, but makes it kind of fun, or at least kind of interesting. The big difference between the dominatrix and the bitch is that the bitch is emotionally hot, while the dominatrix is emotionally cold. The dominatrix delivers her orders and assessments with no anger and no smile. I'm thinking Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.

4) The cute girl.

You might think, and I used to think, that the cute girl mode would only work for women who are relatively young and powerless. But it's a surprisingly versatile mode, and it can be effectively deployed in a variety of ways. The essential thing is you make your demands pleasant and fun to satisfy because, Hey! They make a cute girl happy and proud. I can't think of any public examples, but I assure you I have seen this in action.

I suppose it's telling that I have real examples for 1 and 2 but not for 3 and 4. Maybe these are more successful modes. I don't know.

In any case, it's not an exhaustive list. You can mix and match or create your own!
These are just, you know, suggestions.

Digital Info: Where Is The Love?

2008-10-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

I teach at a University. University libraries offer their students and faculty various kinds of access to electronic resources. Usually, this includes digital access to past issues of journals that someone has scanned in.

I often use such articles from such journals in my teaching. Students are famously paying way too much for textbooks these days, so I want to save my students money by making use of these resources.

It's pretty easy to put a link on their course page where they can download the article. It's free. They can then print it out, or use it on their computer, or whatever. This is almost like a utopia of information accessibility.

I started this process for a new course the other day, and I found that one of the articles is in the right journal -- the library has access, in this case through "Poiesis" -- but for some reason whoever is supposed to scan in the journal never scanned in that issue. From that year there is volume 2, 3, and 4, but no volume 1, which is the one I need.

I emailed my reference librarian, who was kind and energetic, and tried to help. But basically, there is no answer. The reference librarians don't know how to get in touch with Poiesis, and all they'll tell me is that "Acquisitions" doesn't know either.

They're going to scan it in and get copyright clearance, so it's the same thing, I guess. But I couldn't help trying to ask them a few questions: wasn't there a contract between the university and someone? Doesn't that someone agree to provide certain stuff? Isn't the library paying? Can't they contact whoever they are in this contract with, to say, Hey, Guys, You are missing Volume 1?

You know if the library had paid for some book series and never received one of the volumes, nobody would be all, "Oh. Um, guess theres's nothing we can do." They'd be up in arms.

But digital info, it gets no love.

Really, I can hardly believe how slow the move to open source information is. I mean, there are two journals in my entire discipline that I know of that are open source. And what about books and essay collections?

The big thing is "gatekeeping" and CVs. You know, if you just put something online, that doesn't really show you've accomplished something important in your research. If your article is accepted by a journal, or published in a book, it does show you've accomplished something important in your research. That accomplishment shows up on your CV, which is how other people evaluate whether you're accomplishing things, or just posting rantings on the internet.

But surely it's possible to devise some analogue to the open source journal, except for publications of all kinds? You know, where it's open source, but some gatekeeper is making the "acceptance" process meaningful?

You know, the actual publishers aren't going to lead the way, 'cause it's not in their interestes. Probably it will require some initial infusion of energy and capital. No one in education has capital. They do have energy, though. So hey, rich people, if you want to help out with the spread of free information around the world, please! Please help!

Don't Look Behind The Literary Curtain

2008-10-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was hit hard by the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Not because I knew him personally -- I didn't -- and not because I was a big fan of his books or anything. I've never actually read any of his books. I started Infinite Jest, and wasn't in the mood for it, and been planning to try it again soon.

I guess the suicide hit me hard because he's roughly my age, and because he seemed to have everything a thinking person could want in life.

He was a respected writer, with a good teaching job, where by all accounts his students adored him. He was married. He was obviously talented and intelligent. He had accomplished a lot.

So I guess I found it destabilizing to remember that even with all those things, life can just seem really empty and hollow if you're looking at it in a certain way.

I say "remember" because this is something I know. It's something I try not to think about too much, because it's frightening.

The short New Yorker "Postscript" about Wallace in last week's issue quotes Wallace as having said that great literature made him feel "unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually."

I was like, "Yeah! Me too! I know exactly what he means."

Indeed, reading novels is one of the main sources in my life for keeping at bay the bad feelings of emptiness and hollowness. In this I contrast reading novels to other kinds of thinking. Some kinds of thinking encourage a kind of up-from-above perspective on life, a perspective from which it's easy to get a kind of vertigo.

You look, and you think, What is the point of all this exactly?

Now, reading a novel for me is like the opposite of that feeling. There's a basic level of "Ooh! What a scoundrel! What's going to happen next?"

But there's also a more complicated set of feelings, that I hadn't really thought to articulate, but you know, Wallace pretty much sums it up. "Not alone." Right. Uh-huh.

Now to me, thinking about literature, rather than just reading it, can sometimes give me the bad, vertigo, feeling rather than the good, unalone feeling. It's just such a reflective activity somehow.

I want to be in front of the literary curtain, being all amazed and entranced, not behind the literary curtain, thinking about how it's all put together and what it all means.

From what I can tell, Wallace's books are the books of an novelist who spent a lot of time reflecting on how it's all put together and what it all means. Maybe all novelists have to do this; I don't know. But I could see how all that thinking would make a person prone to despair.

All this reminds me of an image (from a novel!) that I think about all the time. In Philip Roth's excellent book The Anatomy Lesson, the main character, Zuckerman, is a novelist, and he writes about how tough novel-writing is. Day after day, alone with the typewriter and your own brain, pounding your head against the wall and tap tap tapping on the keys.

Zuckerman says something like, If there were a monkey doing this, and people were looking in at him, in his cage, obsessed, day after day, with the same activity, they'd probably say, "Gee, isn't there something someone can do? Can't we at least get him a companion"?

It's one of my most favoritest things in literature. Makes me feel deeply, and totally, unalone.

Quietly

2008-09-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was browsing around in the bookstore looking for something to read the other day, and I settled on this book called Adverbs. It's by Daniel Handler, who it turns out, is also the author of those Lemony Snicket books.

For some reason I've never even looked at the Lemony Snicket books. I think I became conscious of them the same time I became conscious of Harry Potter, and I didn't really like the one Harry Potter book I read, so somehow, I don't know, one of those things.

This book, Adverbs, has a lot of funny things about it, things I would have said I would really, really, not like in a book.

For one thing, all the chapter headings are adverbs. You know, Chapter 1: Immediately. Chapter 2: Obviously.

Also, the chapters don't really follow any single cohesive narrative line. They jump around, there are lots of characters, you're not sure when the stories intersect. Or even if they intersect.

Finally, the book is "about love." Right on the back, it says, "This novel is about love."

Just as I'm buying the book, I'm thinking, What am I doing? These all sound like things I will hate.

But I was a little desperate. Regular readers may remember that I'm toward the end of Volume 4 of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, so maybe you're wondering, how could you be desperate for something to read?

Well, the copies I have of Proust are big, hardcover books. Not really the sort of thing you pop into your purse to read on the subway, and not really the sort of thing you want to carry around all day. Also, you may have heard, as wonderful as those books are, Proust can be, you know, a little sad.

So I bought Adverbs. And I got totally swept up in it. I loved it. None of the qualities I thought would be annoying or peculiar were annoying or peculiar.

What I liked most was the simple calm feeling of the whole thing. This book just does its thing. When it's done right it seems effortless but writing simple sentences is very difficult, which is why you don't see it that often.

The adverb I'd use for this book is: Quietly. Even when there's drama, this is somehow a quiet book, in the nicest way.

For example, the last chapter, "judgmentally," begins this way:

"In the United States, where this love story is set, we all get to make decisions about love, even if we're not citizens or if we don't know what we're doing. If you get into a taxi and you fall in love there, no laws passed by the government of the United States will prevent you from making a fool of yourself. If you have someone in mind for the prom, you do not have to submit this person to a vote. If you want to be a lover, that is your call, no matter your mother's advice or what the song on the radio is going on about. The love's yours, for the time being.

If you'd rather be a criminal, though, we have a different system for that."

I don't know why I like this little passage so much, but I do. I love "even if we're not citizens or if we don't know what we're doing," and "we have a different system for that." These sentences are just right for me, somehow.

Maybe they'd be right for you, too. It's hard to say.

Love: always complicated and unpredictable.

A Moral Hazard Before It Even Happened

2008-09-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Times has this new blog called "Economix." It's supposed to be about "the science of everyday life," which is already annoying to me, as if economics were the basic tool for explaining why people do what they do.

As I've discussed on C and C here before, economists cheerfully admit they have no idea why people do ordinary fun things like pay a lot for concert tickets, or why they feel compelled by fairness to pay for things even when it's not required, or why people vote.

Also the economic theory of rationality predicts that we all act in our own self-interest, which is just obviously false.

So while it's fine with me if they want to study money, the idea that economists are going to explain everyday life is just really, really irritating to me.

Anyway, over at one of their "guest posts" today, an economist named Bob McTeer explains that contrary to appearances, the bailout represents no risk of "moral hazard."

Moral hazard is when someone is rewarded for behaving badly or doing something dumb, and so is more likely to do it again next time rather than less.

The crux of McTeer's argument seems to be that since the individuals who made bad decisions actually will suffer consequences, there's no moral hazard. I'm not sure I've got all the details, but the idea seems to be that since the CEO's of AIG etc., are going to lose their jobs and money, the CEO's of the future won't be tempted into the bad behavior that got us into this mess.

CEO's, McTeer says, look at what happens to other CEO's, not to what happens to customers.

I don't know how this applies to the proposed bailout -- McTeer objects to the term "bailout" in any case -- but the basic idea seems to be that as long as you save the company but not its owners and managers, you don't risk moral hazard.

I'm no economist, but come on, really? Even before all this happened, lots of people were wondering at the planning skills of the people in charge. Lots of people were wondering, why on earth are these companies taking such enormous and dumb risks? It's not like no one knew something like this could happen.

One reason it must have seemed safe to take huge risks was because everyone else was taking huge risks. So you figure, well, we can't all go down in flames; the economy won't survive that. So there's safety in numbers.

Turns out that was right. Because we're going to bail these guys out. So the bailout created moral hazard before it even happened, just because we knew it was overwhelming likely that something like it would happen.

I'm not buying McTeer's argument that losing a job is the ultimate in motivating a CEO or bank manager to act one way rather than another. Anyway, anyone who *was* motivated by that sort of fear into behaving in ways that weren't taking big economic risks probably would have been fired before the crisis, for not bringing in enough money.

So the no moral hazard argument, I am not buying it.

The Empty Nest Syndrome Of My Mind. Or Not.

2008-09-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

Oops, when I was supposed to be writing on Commonwealth and Commonwealth yesterday I was at the mall instead. And then I forgot I hadn't done it.

It's ironic (as we say nowadays) because I was going to write about the empty nest syndrome inside my mind, the basic idea being that having recently outgrown my own adolescence, I could experience empty nest syndrome without having any kids.

The "kid" I was missing (I was going to explain) was me.

My whole life up to now I've been accompanied by a person who refuses sensible shoes, dreams of owning a sports car, wants to spend every late afternoon with a martini in hand, and incessantly demands to be taken to the mall. Me.

Now I'm getting a little older, and some of those impulses are fading. And it's like, wait, where's that teenager? What's she doing? It's boring around here without her.

Unlike the real empty nest syndrome, I can't call her up on the phone. She doesn't exist anymore.

So I was going to say all these things, but as I say, I went to the mall yesterday, and I bought some jeans, and I tried on an incredible leopard print (fake fur! don't worry!) jacket, and I went to the Apple Store, and I blew a fortune on a new bottle of my favorite perfume, and boy! Well, I felt like a new woman. I mean, like a new girl. Or whatever.

So reports of the missing adolescent were premature. I'm relieved. The empty nest of my mind was kind of sad and lonely.

Holmes Vs. Watson

2008-09-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Who would you rather meet, spend time with, have as a friend, Sherlock Holmes or James Watson?

I'm assuming everyone's answer is "Sherlock Holmes."

I've just been rereading the stories, and I am struck by how strongly this feeling persists in spite of the extraordinary lengths Conan-Doyle goes to to show what a cold, unfeeling, unfriendly -- actually unpleasant -- person Holmes is.

I mean, it's one thing to want to be friends with someone who is sort of distant, but also human. The feeling in that case is that maybe the friendship would be extra special, or something. You know, kind of exclusive. The person who is friends with no one, being friends with you.

But wanting to be friends with Sherlock Holmes? Weird. I mean, at every turn, we hear about how little he cares for anyone, how completely self-absorbed he is, how utterly uninterested in the little pleasures of ordinary life. A man totally unmoved by beauty, humor, sympathy.

Watson, of course, the opposite. A doctor. A man of whim and feeling. An appreciator of women. But still. Holmes is always so much more interesting.

Actually one thing Holmes does get a little emotional about is the pain of human existence, and I have to say, it's kind of moving when he does. He makes clear that he requires his intellectual puzzles to make the incredible boredom of life bearable.

I can kind of relate to that, and to wanting to drown one's boredoms in cocaine and tobacco.

Still, it's not like being with Holmes and watching him drown his boredoms would make you feel any better about life. Don't you think it would be guaranteed to make you feel worse?

This makes me think that the whole way that people are kind of drawn to people who pay less attention to them, rather than to people who pay more attention to them, is kind of a deep fact about human nature rather than some, you know, little wrinkle that applies only occasionally.

Solving Or Ruminating: A False Dichotomy

2008-09-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote this post recently, about what I learned from guys, and one of the thing I listed was

"Just get on with it."

I explained that it's not always necessary to understand, or even contemplate, the ins-and-outs of something that is troubling you. Often, I said, if you just let time pass, go to sleep, don't worry too much, it'll just feel OK.

It's not that problems solve themselves; it's just that 1) a lot of situations are not improved by reflection, because there is nothing really to be gained by it, and 2) when there is something to be gained by it, it's just as likely to be something you realize in 20 years, not 20 minutes.

I feel this idea is basically supported by recent research, summarized in a recent New York Times article, which concludes that among teenage girls, some kinds of "co-rumination" can actually make a person feel worse. Sometimes, it's just depressing to hear about others being depressed about the same things you are; sometimes, it seems rehashing the various issues leads to new and puzzling differences between friends.

Talking things out: not always for the best.

As I understand it, this conclusion sort of side-steps both the stereotype of girls being "empathizers" and the one of guys being "fixers." In the research reported, both empathizing and fixing could be bad.

Which supports my own conclusion: sometimes, you just gotta let it go.

Female Orgasm: You Thought You Knew The Story

2008-09-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

OK, at least I thought I knew the story about female orgasm.

I thought it went something like this:

Starting with Freud, there was this general idea out there that a woman could have an orgasm in two different ways: via the clitoris, and via the penis-in-the-vagina -- a "vaginal" orgams.

Then, it turned out that most women had orgasms from clitoral stimulation. Indeed, further research - I thought - showed that the clitoris is the basic organ of the female orgasm: sure, a girl can come from having a "p" in her "v" but it's only because the p -- or some other body part -- is indirectly stimulating her clitoris that she has an orgasm.

This, I thought, modulo some confusing stuff about ejactulation and the g-spot, was the basic story, and I took it to debunk the old theory that there were "inferior" and "superior" orgasms.

I felt comfortable, that is, shaking my head in disappointment when some ill-informed young man would write into an advice columnist, as they often do, to say, Hey, my girlfriend doesn't come just from intercourse . . . what's wrong with her? Should she see a doctor? All the girls in porn come that way.

Then the other day Jezebel had two posts (here and here) about an actual research article whose title is

"A Woman’s History of Vaginal Orgasm is Discernible from Her Walk"

The title really says it all - or, rather, most of it. Sex researchers guessed right most of the time whether a woman had a self-reported history of vaginal orgasm from wathing her walk. I haven't had the patience to read through the whole thing but they tested 30 girls.

The thing is, this story cites as known fact all that stuff I thought was false. Here's a characteristic passage:

"Compared to women who have had vaginal orgasm (triggered solely by penile–vaginal stimulation), vaginally anorgasmic women display more use of immature psychological defense mechanisms[1], are less satisfied with their relationships, mental health, and life in general [8,9], and are more likely to suffer from global sexual dysfunction [10]."

Whoa! Really? If you want to chase down those footnotes, the article is in J Sex Med 2008;5:2119–2124, that is, the Journal of Sexual Medicine. You'll have to be on a subscribing computer. Or you can email me for the pdf.

One of the references - the last - is to Fugl-Meyer KS, Oberg K, Lundberg PO, Lewin B, Fugl-Meyer A. "On orgasm, sexual techniques, and erotic perceptions in 18- to 74-year-old Swedish women." J Sex Med 2006;3:56–68.

Which sounds more like a Monty Python skit than an academic paper, but whatever.

I really don't know what is going on here.

Feminism and Families

2008-09-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

I just spent several days in bed resting my back. On the second day, I finished volume three of Proust, and I didn't have volume four in the house. My spirits needed a little light reading, so I ended up with a series of comic novels, including David Lodge's Nice Work and Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates.

One thing these books both have in common is that they feature "housewives."

In Lodge's book, a businessman and a woman professor are thrown together; part of the story turns on the businessman's relationship with his family; the wife in the family is a stay-at-home mom and the kids are obnoxious, entitled, teenage assholes.

In Lurie's book, Mrs. Tate herself is a stay-at-home mom; and the kids are obnoxious, entitled, teenage assholes.

It's easy to forget how fast things have changed, but they really have, because family life as depicted in these books barely exists any more. These days, even when moms stay home, they have lots of things they do outside the family, the father is expected to function as a parent, and when the kids are teens, the moms are often back out in the world, doing stuff.

Not many American moms send their 15 year-olds off to school then spend the day mopping the kitchen floor.

And I gotta say, reading those books make you feel, Thank God For That.

It's awful. The men are bored with their wives, because their wives are boring. Because they don't do anything. The men regard their children as interlopers, ruined by their mothers' spoiling them, external to their own provenance and care in life. The women, of course, are at the mercy of the men, because they're home all day and not making any money.

When you think about it, it's amazing that model worked as well as it did.

Isn't what we have better? I mean, I know it's kind of too bad that women often "have to" work now, economically. But you know, because a standard of living is a relative thing, the reason this is true is that, well, most women work. And that just seems so much better than the earlier alternative.

Fathers these days, even when they're really busy at work, tend to regard their kids upbringing as partly their responsibility. Mothers these days, even when they're earning less and doing more child- and house-care, regard their own autonomous lives as really important. It's a big improvement.

And you know, even teenagers don't seem as crazy as they used to -- or at least, not in the same way. Maybe I'm naive. But the stereotype these days is of the kid who can't get off the phone with his parents, who talks to them all the time, who is pretty comfortable being part of the family, who isn't spending every minute longing for escape.

I started to wonder if this was maybe related to the feminism business. You know, if your mom picks up your room, washes your gym clothes, then flies off the handle about your taste in music, that's like a recipe for disaffection.

But if your mom, like your dad, is out working for the money to buy you stuff, and asks you to help with the dinner dishes because she's busy, and is too tired to complain about your taste in music, well, that's like a recipe for family involvement.

This is one way I believe feminism has been good for families.

Danger Where You Least Expect It

2008-09-04T05:43:00.000-07:00

Of all the things that can get in the way of getting work done on sabbatical, I failed to see the one that has befallen me: all the hours in front of the laptop have led to back pain, which, of course, is especially bad when I'm sitting in front of my laptop. What to do?

For now, rest. But really, you'd think there'd be all kinds of configurations for typing in other positions. I mean, why not? Why not a recliner with a screen, to which you could add a wireless keyboard? Wouldn't that be cool?

Maybe I have to get a giant cinema display and put it on my wall. Would that be awesome or what?

I tried to post from my iPod but it didn't work - no text in the box. So this is it for now. Obviously I have to read the "Mobile blogging" instructions.

In the meantime, I'm gonna cut this short and go back to lying down.

And I'll reflect that given my previous thoughts on how small other people's problems seem, I can imagine how this looks to those who aren't me: several days of lying in bed reading novels? Doesn't sound too bad!

All I can say is: "Hmph."

Hello, Friends! (Notes From Summer, 2008)

2008-09-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

My last post was on June 11. It is now September 3. This makes me feel a little bad.

I don't know when the next post will be. I have an ongoing internet problem to be solved, but tonight, when, at random, I turned on my computer, the neighboring internet portal let me in again. And though I had nothing in particular to say, really, there was no way not to take advantage of this opportunity.

It is hot here, and I have my keys, but only a limited supply of clean clothes. And I have not watched any of the various conventions, despite having vague (strong) opinions on all of it. And I miss the internet more than I can possibly say. It is a little funny, because most of the people I email with I also talk to, and I have continued to talk to over the long desert that is my lack of internet. So why should I miss the particular form of communication that has to do with funny emails and blog reading and blog comments? But I do. It made me feel stranded and bereft in a way that was not un-related to not having the key to my apartment.

It was very hot all summer and I kept my windows closed for a good three months and my head down. I ate less ice cream than I had planned and drank more coffee. All the plants died and they are still lying outside dead and something needs to be done about it. And it will be.

You will be hearing from me. In the meantime, I had the pleasure on gorging on all of Noko Marie's posts at once, like someone who has had no internet for months.

Other People and Other Places

2008-09-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

There's something about the problems of a stranger that they never really seem that bad.

I don't mean problems like cancer, or the death of a child, or whatever. Those problems do seem really bad. But the ordinary, run-of-the-mill problems of strangers -- like having adolescent kids that are a pain in the ass, or having a boss that's an idiot, or having a parent who is harrassing -- is it just me? those problems never really seem that bad.

What I'm trying to say is, I routinely underestimate the small life difficulties of others.

For instance. There's a food court area in the library where I do my work, and the other day I overheard two women who had clearly met to have coffee and talk. They were each about, oh, I don't know, maybe 55 years old. It was about 10 am.

One of them was describing some problem she was having at home -- I couldn't tell if it was an unsupportive spouse, or what -- but the two women talked over the issue at length and at one point the woman with the problem said, "I just don't know if I can take it anymore."

This is ridiculous, but something about the scene seemed so homey and nice. The friend, the chit chat, the cup of coffee, the morning sense of the whole day to look forward to. I found myself thinking, "Isn't that nice."

I had to remind myself, "This woman just said she didn't know if she could take it anymore. Obviously she has some kind of real problem, not just some, you know, trivia." Somehow, not knowing her, I found it hard to make it vivid.

I think people do this a lot. They read in the paper about some family that is living on 450 dollars per month, and relying on food stamps, and they think, "Well, sure, that sounds bad, but it doesn't sound that bad." When you know if they were in the same situation they'd be going out of their minds with unhappiness.

I don't know why this happens. But I was struck the other day by sense of how different it is with places. With places, you underestimate the difficulties of the familiar, not of the strange.

At least I do. In a city I know and care about, the little patches of decay and dirt don't seem depressing, really; they're just the decay and dirt of home. I didn't grow up in New York City but I spent time there as a kid and I really like it and when someone says to me, "Well, but it's so dirty!" I'm like, well, yeah, that's sort of true. It is dirty. But who cares? Why do you care?

When you're in a strange place, though, all the little negatives loom so large. "Those streets, they're not in a grid, it's very confusing!" "That section of town with the overpass and the boarded up storefront, how depressing and sad!"

I think if you grow up with the particular problems of a particular place, you just don't notice them as much.

I grew up on the East Coast of the US, and sometimes my California friends will say to me, "But when it's cold, you have to put on all those clothes before you go out! Boots, coat, hat, mittens, what a pain in the ass!"

And I'm like, "Yeah, you do have to do all those things. I never really thought about it. And your point is. . .?"

Women Are Hybrids

2008-08-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

My whole life I've felt kind of like a combination between a woman and a man. I'm not sure what I mean by that exactly, except that I like traditional guy things, like math, and also traditional girl things, like shopping for shoes and kittens.

I'm a hybrid. I've always wanted a serious career, and I've always wanted to have matching sets of towels at home. I like being a wise-guy, but I'm also empathetic.

I feel it at my job. I teach philosophy, and most of my colleagues are guys, and we have a kind of rough-and-tumble style where we argue a lot, and for the most part I think that's great. On the other hand, when I'm with my female colleagues, or my female graduate students, I enjoy chatting about clothes, and family members, and our lives, in ways I find hard to do with guys.

At first I thought I was unusual in being a hybrid. But then I realized that even though there are varying degrees, all women these days are hybrids. Women work outside the home, manage money, do all the traditional guy things, and also mother, nurture, make dinner, do all the traditional woman things.

The number of comic strips about women being "conflicted" about their family roles and their public roles shows that it really is more like being a hybrid than a new coherent entity. It's putting two things together that no one's really sure how to make them fit.

My next realization, though, was that not only are all women hybrids now, they've always been hybrids. No one has ever been the feminine ideal as it's been constructed through western history. You can see it going all the way back: women trying to live the passive life they're told is feminine, while also wanting the more active life they're told is masculine.

When you put it that way, it seems there's no way for a woman not to be a hybrid. The things we associate with humanity -- like autonomy -- are things we associate with masculinity. So to be a female person is to combine feminine virtues with masculine ones.

So it's not just me.

What should we do? Junk the ideals of femininity in hopes of forging a new coherent self? Be happy being conflicted?

Personally I think conflicted is just fine: there's enough hours in a day to teach class at 1 and shop for shoes at 4:30.

The whole unity of virtues thing - it's kind of a guy idea anyway.

So I say: let's stay hybrids, and take fly the banner of ambivalence with pride.

The Long View Of Life

2008-08-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've been a little under the weather the past few days, so I'm not up to regular standards of originality and so on. Nothing serious: just a few aches, pains, upset stomach, whatever.

After I wrote this post about being a culture snob, and about reading Proust, I thought to myself, "You know, you last read those books over ten years ago. Wouldn't they be worth reading again?" So I started in with Volume 1.

I'm just getting toward the end of Volume 2. And honestly, what I'm struck by is how deeply sad these books are. Even when the story is happy, the reflections are really fucking sad.

Or, at least, they're making me sad. I don't remember feeling quite this way the first time, so maybe I'm just getting old.

One reason they may have this effect on me is that Proust often takes the long view of life: he sees the arc of a human life, and humans, as if from a long way off. Here's Proust talking about some girls he meets as an adolescent. These are girls he worships from afar and is finally is introduced to. He can't help but think of their future selves, and of the future selves of all of us, and of how little we know ourselves:

"I knew that, as deep, as ineluctable as Jewish patriotism or Christian atavism in those who imagine themselves to be the most emancipated of their race, there dwelt beneath the rosy inflorescence of Albertine, Rosemonde, Andree, unknown to themselves, held in reserve until the occasion should arise, a coarse nose, a protruding jaw, a paunch which would create a sensation when it appeared, but which was actually in the wings, ready to come on, unforeseen, inevitable, just as it might be a burst of Dreyfusianism or clericalism or patriotic, feudal heroism, emergins suddenly in answer to the call of circumstance from a nature anterior to the individual himself, through which he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength or dies, without ever being able to distinguish that nature from the particular motives he mistakes for it."

The truth of these kinds of observations makes me feel really unhappy. So much so that I wonder if my aches and pains and upset stomach aren't somehow a symptom of reading. Isn't that what melancholy is like? The long view of life is tough.

People like to say that there's a kind of moral responsibility to believe the truth. And it's cases like this that always make me wonder how far that's supposed to go. If I believe the truth about my own decay and my own ignorance about myself, I might not have the force of life required for getting up and going about the day. So can I just pretend that today is forever? Or is that irresponsible somehow?

I contemplated giving up the Proust re-reading project, but as that passage shows, even though these books are sad they're also really funny. Just typing out "would create a sensation when it appeared," when applied to a someone's paunch, made me laugh. So in addition to the obvious reasons (greatness etc.), there's that.

Maybe I'll take the books with a couple of advil. I'll let you know how that goes.

What I Learned From Guys

2008-08-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've spent a lot of my life around guys. I don't play sports, but I've studied guy-ish things, and I work in a field with mostly guys.

Here are some things I've learned from guys:

1. Pretend to have more confidence than you actually have.

Guys just act like they know what's what, even when they don't. They don't try to be honest about their insecurities, hoping someone will reassure them. This is wise. No one knows who is pretending. And when things are tense, almost everyone prefers to deal with someone keeping up a good front rather than someone in confessional tension mode.

2. Just get on with it.

When things go wrong, it's not always necessary to figure out what happened, or understand what it all means. Often feeling OK about stuff just comes naturally if you move on. Just get on with it: go to bed, wake up, start over, forget about it.

3. It doesn't matter if the bathroom is dirty.

Unless it's really filthy, no one will notice or care. If it's a choice between cleaning the bathroom and having a cocktail, guys say, have a cocktail.

4. Dumb things like pinball, video games, comic books, and adventure movies are fun.

I kind of had to develop a taste for these mindless pleasures, but now I see their true, deep, and enduring value.

5. Bring home the bacon.

Nothing gives you independence and power like a good salary. Sure, money doesn't buy happiness. But stop earning money and pretty soon you're cooking someone's meals and cleaning their kitchen floor, while they're zoning out with Baywatch. Having your own money doesn't prevent such a state of affairs, but not having your own money gives you no way out of them.

I'm sure there are other things but I can't think of them now. This is not to say, of course, that there aren't things guys should learn from me. But that's a post for another day.

Thanks guys!

No "General System Of Mendacity"?

2008-08-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

For various reasons I've been thinking about what happens when people act, or judge, in ways that fail to fit a coherent or systematic pattern. It's tempting to say that there's something funny, or wrong, when someone who always acts or judges in accordance with a policy or system then acts or judges against that policy.

If someone goes around denouncing various behaviors, and gets all high and mighty about it, and then engages in the very same behavior herself, or approves of it in her friends, well, it's really annoying.

Sometimes such a person is judging, or acting, in a way that is hypocritical, or morally creepy. To judge according to one set of standards for person A and another for person B just because you like B better violates the demands of fairness. So there can be a moral condemnation.

But some people have the intuition that it's more than "unfair" to do this -- that it is somehow a violation of reason. It's "irrational" not to judge like cases alike. To which one always wants to say, "what on earth makes one case like another"?

I don't buy this irrationality move, myself. But in thinking about why it's wrong, I was struck by how hard it is to even say what is going on when someone judges in a way that seems "arbitrary," or non-systematic.

Because there are actually several things that can produce the effect, and they're all different.

Of course, a person may just be judging non-systematically and letting their emotions run away with them. That's the ordinary case.

But it could also be that a person has a kind of fucked-up policy in the first place. If someone's policy or system is to judge their friends according to one standard and strangers according to another policy, then they haven't violated their policy when they judge their friends differently. They just have an odd sense of priorities in the first place.

Then, too, a person might be in the process of changing his mind. If I have a policy of judging that something is bad, but then my friend gets involved, I may decide that I was dumb to judge so harshly in the first place, and I might change my policy.

The kicker with the last thing is that not only can I change my policy, I can change it back. How much of this can go on before you start to think the person doesn't really have a policy at all?

In the second and third case, what's irrational?

Imagine R is very harsh in judging drug use: he thinks it is immoral and that the people who use drugs are evil. Then R's nephew gets addicted to drugs and R becomes compassionate and says his nephew is a good kid.

On my three readings, R might be simply allowing his love to get in the way of his judgment, or he may have a set of priorities under which love for family members generally trumps judging them harshly, or he may find that interaction with his nephew changes his mind about drug use.

It's tempting to think we can distinguish the cases by looking at someone's future behavior, but it's not so clear. After all, if R judges a stranger harshly next time, we still don't know whether it's part of a policy or he's just changed his mind back.

While I've been pondering this, I've been rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust describes Odette as someone who acts and judges in a way that fails to be systematic: Odette lies, to her lover Swann, when she finds it useful to do so.

Swann appeals to her sense of coquettry: "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?"

But it doesn't work, because Odette has no policy of lying:

"In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have succeeded in overthrowing a general system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she was simply content whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything she had done, not to tell him of it. So that lying for her was an expedient of a specific order, and the only thing that could make her decide whether she should avail herself of it or confess the truth was a reason that was also of a specific or contingent order, namely the chance of Swann's discovering that she had not told him the truth."

Even with all these details, I'm not totally sure. Is Odette someone with a policy of not lying, who gets carried away by self-interest? Or is she someone with a policy of telling the truth, except in certain circumstances, which in turn rest on self-interest? Or is she someone with a policy of self-interest only: she only tells the truth when it's in her own interest to do so?

I'm inclined to think it's the second one myself: she has a policy of telling the truth except in certain circumstances, which in turn rest on self-interest. In that case, Odette's lying isn't really an exception, at all. It's just part of the program.

We can say that there's something morally fishy about such a life program. But irrational? Not so much.

I Like Babies

2008-08-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

I don't have any children of my own, but I have always liked babies.

I'll tell you why. Babies have the same emotional moodiness we have, but where we cover up our moods with stupid rationalizations and hit-or-miss guesses about what's "really" bothering us, babies are honest. They just have moods.

A lot of times when grown-ups are unhappy, they're just unhappy; it's not like there's some big thing wrong that a cookie and a nap won't make better. But part of being grown up means having "reasons" for feeling bad. You can't just say, "Wah!" You have to say, "It's not fair!" And then you have to explain.

Not that there aren't things that are unfair. There are, and they're worth getting upset about. But often, people just feel bad, in an elementary way, for no reason at all. And it would be nice if, like babies, we could just say, "Wah! I feel bad." And instead of recommending that anyone who feels bad for no reason had better consult a psychiatrist and get a prescription for Prozac, we could just, you know, put them in a bouncy swing, or tuck them in for a nap with some Zweibacks.

It's weird, but most of the time when I hear and see babies crying, it doesn't really bother me. I mean as long as it's normal crying. Sometimes babies cry in that desperate way that is completely freaky and panic-inducing, and that really is upsetting.

But as long as it's normal crying, my basic reaction to crying babies isn't "Ugh, that baby is crying!" but rather, "Hi baby. Unhappy? Believe me, I know how you feel. Welcome to human life."

Toddlers, not so much. Because you know what toddlers are saying. "It's not fair!"

It's the basic transition from baby to person. It's got some good aspects, but I'm not sure this is one of them.

When The Rapture Comes, Please Practice Auto and Bike Safety

2008-08-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

There's a T-shirt shop near my house that often displays a shirt that says,

GOD IS COMING. LOOK BUSY.

When I see it I often start reflecting on what it would be like to have God come down just for the purposes of checking things out -- you know, seeing how we're doing.

I'm an atheist, and an academic, so when I picture God he's always a cross between a fond parent and an authoritative thesis advisor.

This is corny, but one thing I'd like to show God when he comes is the Olympics. I'm not even into sports, and I know there's a lot not to like about the Olympics, but the whole people-from-everywhere all-coming-together to-play-some-games thing always knocks me out.

Today I was at the gym and the TV was showing men's Beach Volleyball, a match between Brazil and Italy. The Canadian announcers explained that Canada hadn't made the qualifying rounds, so there were no Canadian men competing in this sport. Then they explained that it was very hard to tell how the mostly local, Chinese, crowd was rooting, except when China was actually competing, and so the local guy was trying to get them to show their allegiances.

This is all kind of awesome.

Look, God: Here we have cooperation. Playfulness. Tolerance. Peace. At least for a couple of weeks, in one place. Sorry about the oceans all being full of garbage and all the suffering all, but look, we're trying, OK?

There are so many awful things you'd be ashamed to show God that it's not really fun to think of a list. I was trying to think of something really specific that I'd be embarassed about, on behalf of the human race, in addition to all the big and obvious things, and then I remembered the story in the Times yesterday about the consequences of more bicyclists being on the roads these days.

Horrific. Cars banging into people, running them off the road; drivers intentionally harming cyclists; cyclists refusing to obey the rules; cyclists acting like once they get enough people all together they can rewrite the goddamn rules.

Turns out, news flash: people are in a hurry, and they regard their own business as, like, really important.

Now this is really embarassing. Chaos, mayhem, pain, injury, death, for what exactly? Shaving a few minutes off your commute? No. Sorry. If God is coming, this will make us look seriously ridiculous. Time to act like grownups.

Anyway, after we tour the Olympics, and stay away from the traffic hotspots, I'd like to show God the internet and Wikipedia, which are both incredible sources of cooperation and playfulness. I guess the internet's got a way to go on tolerance and peace, but you know, we're trying. Nobody's perfect. Down here anyway.

Bad Behavior And Tolerance In Traffic And Beyond

2008-08-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

"traffic jam" from nicpic's flickr stream. Used under Creative Commons license.

You may have missed the excellent piece in The Sunday Times on traffic behaviors: "The Urge to Merge," by Cynthia Gorney. I almost missed it; I just happened to click on it because, even though I don't have a car, I'm kind of obsessed with traffic.

Gorney talks about two kinds of traffic mentalities, which I'm sure are familiar to everyone.

The "lineuppers" quietly get in place at the end of the line in whatever lane they know they're going to end up in.

The "sidezoomers" zoom past all those patient lineuppers, using whatever lanes happen to be open, then edging their way into the proper lane when the time comes.

The lineuppers are all, "Those goddamn #$%& ing sidezoomers! No sense of fair play! No sense of respect! I'll NEVER let them edge their way in."

The sidezoomers are all, "Meh, all this kerfuffle about nothing! Obviously, the traffic moves fastest when all the available space is used. I'm just trying to, you know, move everyone along. So CHILL, lineuppers."

To my utter delight, Gorney decides to determine, once and for all, who is right, by talking to some actual traffic experts.

Various hilarity ensues, and you should really read the article. But what I can't stop thinking about is the conclusion, which is about as frustrating and annoying as a conclusion could possibly be.

Traffic, it turns out, moves fastest when most people are linuppers, but some are sidezoomers, and -- get this -- when the linuppers just patiently let the sidezoomers in.

I know it's wrong to extrapolate from traffic, to cooperation in general, to morality and free-riders, to the overall meaning of life, but I couldn't help myself.

Think what this means for human existence. Cooperation works best when most people behave, but a few people don't, and when the misbehavior is patiently tolerated?

I find this conclusion just beyond infuriating. I mean, it's one thing if it's best for everyone to be a lineupper. And it's one thing if it's best for most people to be lineuppers, and for the linuppers to punish the sidezoomers. Or at least get to feel really indignant about them.

But the idea that not only is it best when there are sidezoomers, but that the sidezoomers can't be punished? Really. Beyond infuriating.

The fucking icing on the cake, of course, is that not only does the sidezoomer get home earlier, he's probably having a great time, listening to music, chillin', talking on the phone . . . meanwhile the poor linupper not only gets home later, but he has to get all angry and upset along the way. At those goddamn sidezoomers.

Fast forward forty years, the sidezoomer is sipping cocktails at the lineuppers funeral, after the linupper dies of a heart attack from all that indignation he wasn't allowed to express.

I mean, I know "life isn't fair," and all that, but this is ridiculous!

The Devil's Advocate And The Devil Himself

2008-08-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, like a lot of people, I read the Times story about the internet trolls with a kind of horrified fascination.

I knew there were people who would say things they didn't believe, or ask dumb questions, just to get other people riled up. And I knew anonymous comments boards could be horrifically nasty and stupid.

But I didn't know there was this kind of connection between internet cruelty and real-life cruelty and harassment, like when some kids call up and mock the family of a teenager who killed himself. And I didn't know the people who act this way consider it an important or meaningful thing, or that they act together or even that they talk to each other. But there is, and they do, and they do.

I hope all C and C readers will join me in saying, "ZOMG WTF is wrong with these people?"

Anyway, here are three quick thoughts on the whole trolling concept.

1) There's a whole "back up your arguments!" "you can't just say that!" "you have to logically prove your point!" thing you find from regular commenters and trolls alike on message boards, and there's a bit of it here on the Times blog-form discussion of the story. That aspect is hilarious if you happen to teach at a university, like I do. I mean, every day I'm in the classroom asking students to have opinions, to disagree with one another, and to freakin' back up their opinions using logic. Usually I can't get a peep out of them, and when I do, they're usually trying to reconcile some other disagreeing views to show how they really "fit together." Why does this kind of "arguing" and demand for logic come so naturally online to people who shun it so vigorously in real life?

2) The obvious answer is "anonymity." I know, I know, people want to argue when it's anonymous, and they don't want to argue when they're sitting in a room together. I don't really get why this is so, but people have told me it's true, and I believe them. I get why people want to say "*%#@ you, you %$#%ing ^@#$&(@!!!" when they're anonymous, not that it's a taste I share myself. But arguing and demanding reason and logic? That is what you do for fun when no one knows who you are?

3) There are people, some of whom also commented on the Times blog post discussion, who like to say, "Well, I wouldn't do anything really bad, but I do like to stir up trouble on internet discussions by saying stuff I don't really believe in order to get a rise out of people. In order to, you know, get them to back up their arguments. I'm playing Devil's advocate."

As a philosophy professor I suppose I should be thrilled that someone wants to have a debate, but you know what? I think this sort of behavior is actually not OK. I mean, it's fine to say, of something people actually believe but you don't, "I don't really believe X but some people do, and what do you say to that?"

But to pretend to believe something so someone will have to back up and prove to you the opposite is true? Beyond sophomoric, and entering the territory of evil. First, it creates in every reader's mind the possibility he is surrounded by morons or worse. Second, it uses up everyone's time and energy on stupid stuff. Finally, it just makes us all feel like we're surrounded by a bunch of disagreeing and disagreeable weirdos.

So: playing devil's advocate? OK if you're among friends, OK if you explain you're just playing devil's advocate, and if you have a reason. Otherwise? Knock it off!!

Don't Be Judgey!

2008-07-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

Ironically, there seems to be this idea out there -- out there only in the girly blogosphere? I don't know -- that one shouldn't be judgmental.

"Don't judge! I got my thing going on that you don't know anything about and even if you did it's not your place to have opinions about my life 'cuz it's mine anyway and you're not my mom so just, like, don't get all judgey!"

I say "ironic" just because what are internet conversations except occasions to be judgey? OK, I'm exaggerating, but if you're posting on any sort of blog about celebrities, or gossip, or fashion, all it is is fucking judging.

But whatever. We can leave that irony aside. What makes it OK to complain about people being judgmental?

Surely it's OK to judge other people. We do it all the time. The person who beats his kids, the guy who rapes women, and the woman who commits identity theft? All properly judged as morally wanting. The guy who jumps onto the subway tracks to rescue someone? Properly judged a hero.

I figure the subtext of the demand not to be judgey is something like, "don't be judgmental about things that aren't moral wrongs, but are just, you know, things I'm doing."

And I think this is fair and reasonable. Often the demand arises in connection with something that is in the moral margins. You know, like judging whether someone may withhold certain information in relationships, or whether someone may lie in some circumstance, or whether it's OK to let your kids drink alcohol in your home.

These kinds of cases are on the moral margins in the sense that we think there's some moral aspect to the situation, but we know everyone isn't going to agree on whether it's a case of moral wrong -- "oh, no, you mustn't" -- or moral permissibility -- "I wouldn't, but hey, knock yourself out."

Knowing that it's a marginal case, the defensive person feels it's his right to judge for himself. Not to be judged. Or maybe the defensive person feels that in whatever context the conversation is happening, the demands of politeness or friendship or community are overriding, so that as long as its a marginal case, she shouldn't be judged.

I think this is a fair demand, and I just want to pause here to note that it rests on what I think of as a "traditional" model of morality.

On the traditional model, there are things that are morally charged, and things that aren't, and a few things in the vague area in between. As long as someone's doing OK with the morally charged things -- like not abusing kids -- they get to do what they want with the non-morally charged things. Morality only covers a small subsection of life.

There's been a kind of interest lately in overthrowing the traditional model, in favor of an even older, but also newer, "holistic" model. On the holistic model, life isn't divided into a kind of moral domain and non-moral domain; instead, a life as a whole can be well-lived, or not. So the philosophers talk of "virtue ethics," rather than "rights-and-duties." Live a life of virtue!

On the holistic model, the aim is to live a good life, and to worry less about moral rules and transgressions and more about how one's life works overall.

When you put it this way, the holistic model sounds nice: open-ended, flexible, accomodating.

But I just want to point out one thing. On the holistic model, there's no escape from "judgey."

Since there's no non-moral domain, everything you do is up for evaluation, by yourself, and by others. There's no defense of acting in the moral margins, because there are no moral margins -- there isn't even any non-moral domain of life, really.

To me it's a huge problem with the holistic model. Hey, you know, if I want to live a stupid life, what's the problem? As long as I'm not hurting anyone? The main good thing about the traditional model is that the answer is clear: "Nothing."

On the holistic model, the answer is, "Well, maybe lots, depending on how stupid your life is." The range for judgey is huge.

So just to say. Next time you're thinking it would be better to junk all those moralizing rules, or the inflexibility of the demands of rights and duties, think of what you're missing: the right to say, "Don't judge!"

Not Reading About Not Reading

2008-07-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a car trip and even though I had almost no time for the internet and didn't buy the Sunday Times, I couldn't avoid hearing about the, um, news:

"OH NOES no one READS anymore and everyone just looks at the INTERNETS all day and what about WAR AND PEACE and what kind of moron spends her whole day SOCIAL NETWORKING!"

The story is here, but um, to be honest, I didn't read it.

I tried, but I got bored. Isn't this debate getting old? I mean, I love books as much as anyone, and I want them to survive, and I value and treasure the mode of reading associated with books, and so on and so forth.

But there are actual interesting questions about the future we could be discussing instead.

For example. I teach Philosophy. I used to assign some reading, from Hume, or Plato, or whatever, and students would have to go read it and try to puzzle out what it meant. OK, they didn't HAVE TO, but figuring out how not to was hard.

Now, there are a million websites laying out all the basics. Hume said X, he meant Y, in simple language this means Z. Recently, most people think W, though some also think Q.

Now, you could say, "No looking at the internets when doing philosophy homework!"

But that would be dumb. I know this, because I do the same thing my students do. Or, rather, I do the scholarly equivalent. When I'm reading about something, I google a few phrases; I see what comes up; I check out homepages of authors; I read encyclopedia entries.

Of course, that's not all I do. Duh. That's the starting point. But it's incredible useful, it's easy, and it's pretty fun. Not doing it would be stupid.

So what I want is to get my students to do the same thing: use the internet sources on a subject as a starting point for research on some topic, and then have them do work that brings them from there to somewhere else.

It's not totally obvious to me how to make this work. Assignments will have to be structured differently. Probably different readings will have to be assigned. Even class time may be used differently.

I admit that doing things this way, something will be lost. Students will spend less time reading Hume and more time thinking about Hume-related topics, or reading secondary sources on Hume's philosophy.

That is something lost.

But there are great gains. A student who not only is responsible for learning not only the basics, but who also has to learn what's new about some subject, and has to understand what people are thinking about it now, and who has to sort through various kinds of texts and points of view to figure out what is right, is learning a ton.

Obviously this is critical thinking.

To me, the interesting question is, how are we going to restructure learning so that googling something is not generally cheating, but is rather a way of learning stuff?

'Cause really, trying to get students not to use the internet to learn things is really, really, really, just not going to happen.

I Am An Unreliable Narrator

2008-07-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

No, no, not that kind of unreliable narrator. In fact, when it comes to objective truth, I'm in there with the rest of them.

No, I'm talking about being "unreliable" in a different way.

I wrote recently about how much I loved Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

But not everyone, you know, loved the book. OK. Fine. I can deal with that.

Mostly some people seem to find it cold. The New Yorker review, by James Wood, describes the book as "original and sometimes affecting."

Since I found the book an emotional wind-tunnel, tornado, and roller-coaster, the fact that someone else found it "sometimes affecting" raises, well, let's just say it raises some questions.

Wood also says in his review that Galchen's novel is best understood as being in the "tradition of tragicomic first-person unreliability." An "unreliable narrator" tells a story that is ostensibly about his perceptions of what happened, but is really revealing to the reader the narrator's own perceptual and psychological oddities.

Wood puts another of my favorite books into this category: The Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo. At first I kind of balked at this classification, because I'd been thinking of the unreliable narrator as somehow alienated from the author, and Svevo makes it clear that he loves his narrator Zeno, and identifies with him, no matter how crazy Zeno is.

When Zeno asks three different sisters to marry him in one evening (sequentially), and settles for his third choice, and then discovers that he is delightfully happy being married to her, I feel Svevo is saying not so much, "See how crazy Zeno is?" as "See how funny and unpredictable human life is?"

I love it when Zeno expresses his amazement to the third choice sister, and she says something like "But didn't you know it would be like this? How can you be surprised?"

Zeno's nuttiness seems in a different category from the alienated kind I associate with the novels of Robert Plunkett. Plunkett's My Search For Warren Harding, and Love Junky both present narrators who are really peculiar, not so much in the universal way of Zeno, but in their own individual craziness.

When the hero of My Search for Warren Harding tells us, with a straight face, that he is a fanatic for Morris dancing, this is not, it seems to me, a way of saying, Oh, we all have our goofy obsessions, but rather a way for the author to wink at us about the character without saying anything about him at all.

So I realized that an unreliable narrator can be alienated, but he doesn't have to be. And Galchen's and Svevo's novels are both unreliable but non-alienated narrators.

And then I had my answer about why I love Atmospheric Disturbances (and Confessions of Zeno) so much:

I am an unreliable narrator.

I am acutely aware of the ways in which my first-person experience of the world just fails to add up to the coherent story I use to get around in it.

I find that while I think I know the reason for some feeling, I then discover I don't. I have my "reasons" I tell myself for the things I do, but I know they're probably not the real reasons, which are just unknown to me.

Living life as an unreliable narrator is lonely. Pretty much everyone else -- including me -- knows only the constructed, presentable version.

It's hard to even explain, or describe, the sensation, never mind the underlying phenomena.

So in addition to whatever else, I read these books with a deep feeling of identification. And the suggestion that somehow the crazinesses are universal -- are a matter of degree, rather than of kind, in the unreliability -- I love it.

It's reassuring, not to be alone in the world. And glimpsing the inner self of the unreliable narrator, it's very moving.

The fact that other readers take these books with analytical distance -- "sometimes affecting! -- makes me wonder:

Are other people not unreliable narrators?
Are other people unreliable narrators but they don't know it?
Do other people know they are unreliable narrators but they just don't care?

I don't know. My best guess is that people would be happy to admit they're unreliable narrators of their inner lives, but that they just don't find this fact very interesting, except in a kind of silly, intellectual house-of-mirrors kind of way.

And I guess that's what leads people to feel that books like Galchen's are "sometimes affecting." Cute, intellectually vivid, but only mildly moving. Hmph.

But. Since this is the logic that ends in people writing letters to novelists and inviting them to lunch, I think I'll just stop these reflections here.

"Women Are Irrational!"

2008-07-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

When I learned as a young person that it used to be considered common sense to think that women were less rational than men, I was surprised.

I mean, aren't guys the ones known for getting into impulsive barroom fights, raping women, and buying expensive consumer electronics?

Aren't women known as the planners and the plodders of life? The ones who make grocery lists, nag people to eat their vegetables, and make "safe" but weak investment choices?

OK, I am overstating, but you know what I mean.

I got thinking about this recently when the Times did that series on love in Iraq, or whatever it was, and they quoted some man talking about how the reason one had to keep women indoors was that they were so irrational, they could be talked into anything. Let them out of the house, and some guy will sweet-talk them into having sex, and that'll be the end of it.

Leaving aside all the other questions this raises, I had to ask myself, Well, is this true? Are women are more swayed by emotions they haven't reflected on?

And I replied to myself, "Hmph! Swayed by emotions when it comes to sex? It's guys who are always saying they couldn't help themselves; it's guys who respond to the simplest visual cues; it's guys who actually make less rational decisions when there are pretty girls around (at least if this somewhat wacky study is true).

I explained my ruminations to a wise friend, who said something like, Well, maybe what it is is that women are more likely to change their minds about things in response to what is immediately in front of them, and men are more likely to say constant to abstractions despite conditions on the ground.

I think this may be right. But I don't think it shows women are more irrational. I mean, depending on your goals, sometimes it's means-end rational to change your strategy, or focus on the immediate, and sometimes it's not.

For example, people talk about moral "impartiality." The moral point of view should treat all persons the same.

But we also tend to think parents should take special care of their own children, and are right to lavish extra care on them.

It's easy to see how everyone might be best off when parents lavish extra care on their own children, which means these don't really conflict.

Focusing on the immediate, and not being impartial, can nonetheless be "rational" in the larger sense.

So: I don't think the difference in focus shows women to be less rational.

It is true that a kind of impulsivity can sometimes be irrational, and I think that's why I always thought it was more of a guy thing, especially in the sex and violence realm.

Then I thought, Aha! That's why people always thought of men as more rational: men are rational with particular exceptions. Exceptions they treat as irrationality. Whereas it's harder to carve out the parts of women's behavior that seem impulsive, calculating, emotive, etc. It's all kind of a mix.

And then I had a smaller kind of Aha when I thought, "Oh, and that's why sex was probably considered this strange dark force instead of just a normal part of life."

Maybe you already understood all of this. But it cleared up some things for me.

Speaking of non-impulsivity, here's a fun fact: according to Wikipedia, "a 'darcy' is a unit of permeability." OK it's not named after that Darcy but after another Darcy, but still, wouldn't it have been cuter and equally efficient if they'd made the darcy a unit of "impermeability" rather than permeability?

Noko Marie Is Rationalizing

2008-07-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

I am on sabbatical. You might think, Gee, a person on sabbatical probably has more time and opportunity to post to her blog. And in a sense you'd be right, since my day is kind of my own.

But the truth is, these sabbatical days, I spend my day writing. After a day of writing, I'm kind of not always in the mood to sit down, and, you know, do a little more writing. What I'm in the mood for is more along the lines of, you know, drinking and staring off into space.

Over the next few months, I'm expecting to post about twice a week. So that no one has to check back and check back -- we know how annoying that is! -- I'm going to schedule my posts for Monday, 9:00 am and Thursday, 9:00 am. Now you'll know exactly when to look for more NM wisdom, and when not to bother.

See? I'm rationalizing in the bad way -- poor me! on sabbatical! no time to post! -- and in the good way -- here's my new, improved, organized, better, plan for the future! -- all at the same time.

I just googled "rationalize" to make sure I had that right, and the two relevant web definitions I found are so, I don't know, so nice:

Rationalize: to pretend that one’s desires are caused by impartial reasoning.

Rationalize: to structure and run according to rational or scientific principles in order to achieve desired results.

Somehow that "pretend" sounds a little funny and informal to me. But also cute. Hey guys! Let's play pretend! I'm going to pretend my desires are caused by impartial reasoning!

Anyway, see you all Monday morning, back here.

UPDATE: Oops, OK that's 9am EST, or 6am blog time; these "time zones," so complex!

If This Were A Different Kind of Book. . .

2008-07-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

OK, so I wrote before about how I don't like to read reviews of novels I'm actually going to read, about how in my view the only thing to say about a book you think is great is: it's good, go read it.

So I read a book last week that was like the most amazing book EVER, and so I'm here to tell you to read it. It's called Atmospheric Disturbances.

Nominally it is the story of a man, a psychiatrist, who is convinced his wife has been replaced by someone who is not her: a simulacrum. I could go on an on about how great this book, and how multidimensional its greatness is, but I want everybody to be able to encounter the book without any distracting thoughts about what someone else said about the book.

I didn't have that opportunity myself. I was reading The New Yorker on the bus, and there was a review of this book, and I read the first paragraph, and I felt myself being drawn in, and there I was, reading, and thinking to myself, "Ack! Don't read! You want to read this book! Don't read the review! Noko Marie, put the magazine down!!"

Because I was bored and tired I didn't have the power to resist, and I read the whole review, and let's just say, understatedly, that it did "affect my reading experience in a negative way."

Having read the book I felt it was safe to read today's review in The New York Times, and of course I was annoyed by it -- of course, because, if you love a book, how can you want to read what someone else -- a stranger no less!! -- thought to say about it in a newspaper? You're setting yourself up for doom.

I won't be revealing anything if I say that part of what annoyed me about the Times review was that twice the reviewer said something like, "If this were a different kind of book . . ." Meaning, a book with the same basic plot but told in a completely different way.

Why would you even ask such a hypothetical question in a book review? Um, it's the book it is; it's not an entirely different kind of book.

I also won't be revealing anything if I quote this brief passage from the book, one that I thought was wonderful:

"Indecisiveness, capriciousness -- these qualities in Rema never irritated me. I've always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions, and so I don't look down on others for being the same."

Maybe like sea shells, these sentences don't seem so great when they're separated from their fellows. I don't know; I can't separate them out in my mind.

So don't judge for yourself, just trust me. Read the book.

Oh yeah, and don't judge the book by its cover either, 'cause you won't make any correct inferences. I didn't, anyway.

When Things Go Right

2008-07-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

It's easy to feel like things always go wrong, or often go wrong, or go wrong a good amount of the time.

I figure it's partly because of that special bias we have for noticing certain things. When things go right, well, that's normal life. When things go wrong, it's like, "#@%%*! My life sucks!"

So I just wanted to pause and record something that went right today.

On my way home I got caught in the craziest more torrential rainstorm I think I've ever seen. True madness. I had to walk 1.5 blocks and it was like I'd been dipped in a swimming pool head to toe.

My main fear was for my laptop. I mean, if I were really dipped in a pool, the laptop wouldn't be doing so good.

I had only recently stopped a kind of minimal laptop-protection system, involving a snap-on plastic case and a flimsy backpack, in favor of a sturdier laptop-protection system, involving a lovely Tucano slim case inside a flimsy backpack.

When I got home, the moment of truth:

The computer was completely dry!

Score one huge point for the forces of order, planning, and good luck in the universe. It's not all chaos all the time.

And since the Tucano case did such an awesome job, here's a photo. You can buy it at the Apple Store here, should you want to share my good fortune.

Like the rest of us, it's cuter in person, but you get the idea.

The Environment: Please Play Fair

2008-07-07T19:49:00.000-07:00

(Image from publicdomainpictures.net)

I just finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent piece in The New Yorker about the Danish island where they produce more energy than they consume.

One thing that made the piece excellent was all the specific numerical information. The island has 11 large wind turbines, and about 12 smaller ones. The island is roughly the size of Nantucket. "Together, they produce some twenty-six million kilowatt-hours a year, which is just about enough to meet all the island’s demands for electricity," Kolbert explains.

There's also numerical information about environmentalism in general. I have to say, I've been hoping for such information for some time. I mean, I don't use those energy-efficient lightbulbs, but I also don't have a car, and I don't have many electric appliances. How does it all even out?

Kolbert talks about the conclusions of a Swiss group, that about 2,000 Kilowatts continuously, per person, is about what is sustainable from an environmental perspective. So, if you had 20 100-watt bulbs burning all the time. That's 17,000 Kilowatt hours per year per person.

In some countries, averages are way lower: the average Bangladeshi, Kolbert says, uses about 2,600 Kilowatt hours per year, which is 300 Kilowatts continuously. The average Chinese person is using about 1500 Kilowatts continously; close to the 2,000 Kilowatt goal.

The US and Canada, Kolbert tells us, are at a whopping 12,000 Kilowatts continuously. That means we'd have to reduce by five-sixths the amount of energy we use.

Wow.

I have two thoughts. The first is, it's hard to say from reading the article where my own Kilowatt usage is, but one thing that seems clear is that air travel is my main problematic indulgence.

One round trip between Zurich and Shanghai uses up 800 of that yearly 2,000 target maximum. I make several trips per year on airplanes, and even though they're typically shorter, the number surely adds up.

The second is, I'm not fucking reducing my consumption until some other people reduce theirs, too.

People talk about environmentalism as if it has to be consistent with freedom and autonomy; people can just choose environmentally good alternatives for themselves, as they see fit.

But honestly, there is no way I am curtailing my consumption from, whatever, 12,000 to 10,000 Kilowatt hours by reducing my air travel, while there are plenty of people with second homes on the beach, personal airplanes, and vacation spas for their dogs.

I'm just not. I'm not a big energy user, but I'm not going to become a small energy user 'til some other -- richer -- people step up to the plate.

Western world, consider yourselves informed, and warned. You gotta play fair, or the rest of us aren't going to play at all.

Where's The Soma Spam?

2008-07-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Two things arrived in my inbox yesterday, from unrelated sources, but both dealing with the new holy grail of "happiness."

First, there was a link to a news story from Newsweek showing that people who have children are generally less happy than people who don't.

Then, there was a conference announcement for "Thoughts on Happiness." The beginning of the description of the conference said,

Happiness has long been our ultimate goal. We just haven't made great progress. That's about to change.

At first I thought it was a call for papers, and I thought, "Oh, great! I can submit an abstract for a paper showing that the whole premise of the conference is flawed." Because, really, isn't it old news that "happiness" isn't the whole story on the good life?

The I realized it's not a call for papers, but just an announcement of a happening. They gots an email list; they gots a blog; and they gots a website, so dudes, they are ready to go with the whole "conference" thing.

The best part is if you register really early (to be a "happy worm" - I am not making that up) you pay only 950 Euros as registration fee. Otherwise 1450 Euros. They say, "In total there are just 120 tickets and we want a mixed audience of scientists, creative minds and professionals."

All I can say is, LOL guys!

I don't know who is paying attention here and who isn't, but isn't part of the point of that book Brave New World that happiness isn't really what people want? I mean, if happiness were all we wanted, wouldn't we just pour our energies into creating happiness drugs with no side-effects, and then marketing them to one another with spam subject lines like "Canadia Farmacy, Get ur S@maa here!"

No one seems to be working on that project at all.

Anyway, with respect to the children question, I don't have any kids, and I suppose part of the reason I don't have any kids has to do with the fear of the unhappinesses and deprivations associated with child-rearing. But honestly, it's just a part. In some ways asking whether having children makes you happy just seems like the wrong question altogether.

The researchers sort of seemed to know this, and they admit in the Newsweek article that parents do feel increased "meaning of life" or something.

Maybe someone will bring this up at the happiness conference. Although at 1450 a pop, it's hard to imagine who will be at the happiness conference. We can imagine that, at any rate, poor people won't be the main thing on the attendee's minds.

I Am A Culture Snob

2008-07-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

I didn't set out to become a culture snob. It just sort of happened.

And I have to say, I'm the worst sort of culture snob: the kind who is not only snobby, but sort of proud of it.

I do try not to be too annoying in my actual behavior. But to be perfectly frank, it's sometimes hard to resist feeling that there's value to cultural snobbery: that the world is a better place with a few people in it who read Proust instead of A Year in Provence, or whatever that book was called.

Indeed, that is my sort of snobbery. I put some early effort into developing a taste for certain kinds of things, and that taste has left me bored, and annoyed, and irritated, with other, dumber things.

Let me be clear: I'm not a snob in the sense of preferring the "high-brow" to the common. I loved the Die Hard movies (um, except maybe I didn't see the last one?); I loved Pulp Fiction; I watch Flavor of Love at the gym, and I always read the daily comics in the paper.

Some trashy things are excellent.

But this is just another form of high standards and snobbery, I figure.

I was reflecting on these things over the past few days, because I had a few movie experiences. Toronto, where I live, has an amazing Cinemateque, which shows film series of all kinds of awesome things.

On Friday and Saturday I went to movies starring Marcello Mastroianni. The first was "Il bell'Antonio," which is about an attractive, wild young man who happens to fall madly in love with the girl his parents want him to marry. The second was "A Particular Day," which is about an attractive, somber older man who is in big trouble with the fascist party and spends a day with a thirty-something-and-quite-beautiful mother of six.

(The mother of six is played by Sophia Loren, and she looks lovely, and as the curtain went up, the guy next to me said out loud, "She was still pretty hot!" I know what he means, but jeez.)

These movies both seemed pretty much perfect to me. I mean, they were visually beautiful, with surprising, inventive plots, and interesting characters. Mostly, they managed to work both as "Ooh, ooh, it's a movie, look at that guy, and what's going to happen next?!" and as "Wow, that was a surprising and thoughtful treatment of something complicated I'd never thought about."

Tonight I went to see "WALL-E." I had high hopes: I went because I'd seen the preview, and read a review, and thought the movie seemed like it would be excellent. And it was inventive, and sweet, and reasonably fun to watch. My favorite thing was the visual portrayal of an Earth covered in trash. It was seriously freaky and interesting to see things like freeway on-ramps and megastore parking lots the way they would look after hundreds of years of neglect.

But to be honest, I was also bored. In between the cuteness and the futuristic aspect, the movie was just kind of boring to me. I kept feeling like it was taking up about half my attention.

And then I thought: that's what happens when you're a culture snob. An Italian drinking coffee uses up 95 percent of your attention; a starship hurtling through space with the Milky Way in the background, down around 45.

At least "WALL-E" made my snobbery seem sort of reasonable, insofar as the menace of the movie is lazy corporate types drinking giant sodas and lazing around on deck chairs. You sure got the impression everyone would have been better off trying to make their way through a couple of challenging French novels.

Which brings me back to why I don't feel so bad about my snobbery. Good things are good, right? I know not everyone has the time, mental energy, and habit required to deal with them, but isn't it good if someone does? I'm here, dudes, and willing. I'll keep the Proust flame alive.

Just don't make fun of me too much, and don't get all mad when I don't want to go see Mamma Mia. OK?

WALL-E would thank you, if he could. He's a kind of a wanna-be Proust reader, if not a literal Proust reader, it seems to me.

File Under Weird And Cool

2008-06-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past. For better or for worse, I'm more of a future-oriented person. So I'm not usually grabbed by stories about what happened a long, long, time ago.

But I gotta say, the New Yorker story about the cave paintings, well, that created an exception for me.

I knew there were cave paintings, but I didn't know they were so freaking old - like, what, 32,000 years old? That is something crazy. And it sounds dumb, but I didn't know the paintings were so beautiful.

A photo from the Lascaux cave. (According to Wikipedia, this image is in the public domain.)

Judith Thurman wrote the essay, and she made the pictures sound so interesting -- she made them sound, indeed, beautiful.

One of the things she describes is the academic infighting over what the correct interpretation of the paintings is, and over whether there ever could be a correct interpretation of the paintings, given how little we know about the people who made them.

In a way reading about the debates made me feel very powerfully how much the paintings are "art" just in the same way the stuff in the MOMA or the Pompidou is.

You've had this experience? You're in a museum, and you read some curator's description of some artwork, and you feel both grateful for some context, without which the work seems diminished, but simultaneously skeptical, because the context you're being offered seems, itself, immediately diminishing. And you read the interpretation offered, and you think, "Really? The artist meant to question the politics of abstract expressionism? How do you know? And what makes you think it's so simple?"

The two main interpretations of the paintings Thurman talks about are 1) that they are spiritual/religious/tied to rituals and 2) that they are the pre-historic equivalent of graffiti -- created by teenagers looking to make their mark and get laid.

You see what I mean about creating context, but also diminishing the art? Before I encountered these interpretations, I had a lot of fun imagining these early artists, getting all exciting to make their paintings.

'Cause really, doesn't making these things just seem really cool and fun? Lots of the pictures are highly emotive, most of them depict animals and not people, and lots of them show a kind of animated sense of movement. And they're in caves. You'd have had to struggle to get there, and everything would be seen by the light of fire.

If you could take some pigment, and go into some crazy cave with a bunch of other people, and create this utterly singular experience for people -- how cool and weird is that? If you could do that, you would, and it would be awesome.

Thinking that makes me feel very connected to these artists in a way that the interpretations don't.

The other great thing in the Thurman essay is when she's talking about the intended audience, and she points out that part of that audience is us. This is a deliberate attempt on the part of the artists to connect not only with their ancestors, and their contemporaries, but also with their descendants -- to make something we would look at.

That kind of gave me a chill down my spine.

It makes me want to say,

Dear prehistoric cave painters,
We think the paintings are awesome and beautiful. We understand why you left them for us. And we are so grateful that you did.

Thinking of you,
Noko Marie

Men, Women, Sex, and Opporunity Costs

2008-06-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

Maybe you've encountered this line of reasoning before:

1) Men actively pursue casual sex, even though the "opportunity costs" are high. A guy has to go out, find a girl, buy drinks or whatever, strike out several times, yada yada yada.

2) Women don't actively pursue casual sex, even though the "opportunity costs" are low. Basically all the girl has to do is show up at a bar. And most girls don't even bother to do that.

3) You can judge how much someone wants something by what opportunity costs they're willing to spend.

AND SO

4) Men want casual sex more than women.

There aren't a lot of bits of reasoning that bug me more than this one, and I've been meaning to write about it for some time. But you know how it is when you really care about something: you want to do a good job.

I don't know, I've been distracted. And now I have jet lag from my return to EDT. But I had to write about it today 'cause there's some new evidence that totally proves my point.

My point being that anyone who thinks the opportunity costs for a woman to have casual sex are low is out of their freaking minds.

I'm sure there are ten reasons y'all are smart enough to think of for yourselves. Like guys actually put drugs into women's drinks so they can take them home and rape them. This is the sort of thing I would think beyond belief if I didn't actually read about it happening in the actual news fairly regularly. Often these are guys the women sort of know... they're on a date. It's really just so unbelievable you want to say, "Oh, what are the odds of that?" but you know what? The answer is "Not low enough."

Also obvious is the fact that when you have sex with guys you just met, other people call you a slut. The guy himself, having slept with you, may later decide you are a slut.

Guys, if you're listening: this is truly sucky behavior, and it has to stop. If you want girls to keep having sex with you you have to stop calling them sluts. Period, end of discussion, I don't want to hear any backtalk.

Large as these costs seem to me, they are tiny once you place them next to the main item: Girls get pregnant.

I know people who make this argument know that girls get pregnant, but are they not thinking? Sure, you can use birth control, and sure, you can be careful, and sure you can pay the opportunity costs associated with making absolutely sure the guy is being as careful as he says he is being, condom-wise, and all that, and still, there is still a risk that you're gonna get pregnant.

How is this not the hugest opportunity cost ever? I mean, there you are, you've had a few, you find a reasonable guy who doesn't seem like he'll be raping or drugging you, you don't even know him, and bam, you're carrying his baby??

I know guys risk getting girls pregnant, but I'm sorry this is really not the same. I do sometimes wonder why guys are often not more worried about getting girls pregnant, but that's a post for another day.

Yes, girls can get abortions, or they can give kids up for adoption, or whatever, but seriously, these are huge, huge things in any woman's life.

The kicker, as I see it, comes when you put together the STD risk with the pregnancy risk. You know, when girls get STD's (and they get them more easily from guys than vice-versa as I understand it) it affects their reproductive system. The latest news is that it can cause birth defects. Now we're not talking no "two weeks of antibiotics," we're talking a kid with its parts put together in the wrong way.

As far as I'm concerned, if you're thinking opportunity costs, it's obvious why women sometimes choose to stay home.

Newspapers, Page Views, and Guilty Pleasures

2008-06-20T03:07:00.001-07:00

One thing I don't like about reading stuff on the internet is that someone knows what you've been reading. I don't mean I worry that someone knows what particular things I am personally reading, but rather that it is clear what is collectively being read.

Sites count page views; they count them with care and for specific things; and reasonably, they take more clicks to indicate that there is more interest out there for that sort of thing. "More of that sort of thing," they conclude.

It's a little too bad, because it means one's guilty pleasures are never innocuous.

If I buy a newspaper, I enjoy feeling like some days I can study the international news, and other days I can just wallow in the Life section, and since no one knows either way, it makes no direct difference in how my reading is interpreted. I just, you know, bought the paper.

I'm sure more people buy when there's more catering to guilty pleasures, but I'm also sure that lots of people get a special pleasure from the package: it's nice knowing there's an in-depth story on the Ukranian political situation on page 3, or whatever, even if you're not going to read it today. I want those stories to be there, even if, let's admit it, I read them less consistently than I read the comics.

The total package is what I like about the paper.

Online you can't hide. If you click, guiltily, on the Paris Hilton news, you're part of the gazillion page views that the site gets for its Paris Hilton news, and then the site figures, gotta have more Paris Hilton news.

I know these forces exist in "old media" too; I just feel like they're so accelerated and personal now. Like, every time I click, I'm making life worse in the long run. You: hastening the end of civilization as we know it.

I don't know what the answer is but whatever it is I feel it will have something to do with the structure of advertising revenue, which I'm not up to thinking about right now. Maybe later after my mental candy fix of the morning. Ugh.

Travel Is Infantilizing

2008-06-18T05:55:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned, I'm in Paris. I speak some French - not a lot, not a little, somewhere in between.

Having been here two weeks, I'm going through that phase now where the French words for certain things come into your mind whether you want them to or not. It's when you start to feel, "With enough time, I could really learn this language."

For me that phase is always when it's just about time to go home, because I don't come for all that long. And honestly, when I'm home I find it almost impossible to do the "oh, just practice a little every day" thing. So I'm sure I'll be back to square one next time I come.

I find it very exhausting, the language thing, and part of the reason is that I feel like more than most people I live inside the language of American English. I love its informality, and playfulness; I love that it's always changing and that even dorky professor types like me can say "Dude," and that there's always some snappy word like "laptop" just when you need one.

The French call it an ordinateur portable.

The French do have this crazy thing Verlan which I've always been curious about. It's like you invert the syllables; it's one of those slangs that started in les banlieues to keep the cops in the dark about what you were saying. It sounds awesome but it also sounds like you'd make an ass of yourself if you used in any but the most appropriate context.

Anyway, the other thing that's wearing me out about French is that when you're just learning a language, you're like a child during every interaction.

I go to order a sandwich, in French. The woman at the counter asks me, in French, if I'd like a drink, and I ask her, in French, for "un Coca Light." She smiles and it all goes fine. I am momentarily pleased as punch. Look! I got a gold star!! Yay!

I go to order a croissant, in French. The guy behind the counter asks me, in French, if that's for here or to go, and I am utterly befuddled. Of course "to go" in French is "emporter" which is not easy if the speaker is mumbling. He says, in English, "For here or to go?" I tell him, "Oh, for here." He gives me my croissant. I am momentarily cast down. Boo.

I feel like a four-year-old.

The worst thing for me is that I over-read the reactions on people's faces to see if I'm doing "a good job" communicating. Did I ask politely? Is the lady smiling?

But you know, in the course of things, often people are crabby for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and at home I would never dream of inferring something about myself from whether the barista at Starbucks smiles or frowns at me. She's got her own life.

Of course, at home I know whether I've been polite without gauging these reactions.

It doesn't help that being polite in France is so much a matter of using the right words. "Bonjour Madame," and you're almost all the way there; a friendly American smile and everyone thinks you're a lunatic. You can see them thinking, "What are you smiling like that at me for? Do we know each other? Who are you?"

Once I internalized the rules of not smiling at strangers right away and always saying "Bonjour" I was like halfway home.

But, dude! It's all really tiring.

A New Kind Of Pain In The Ass

2008-06-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

Has anyone noticed this?

You're sitting in a library, in the quiet part. It's quiet. People are working: reading, thinking, writing, typing away . . .

Typing away. After a few minutes you realize there are one or two people who use a simple computer keyboard as if they're wrestling their inner demons out, as if they're typing on a manual, as if it's only the intense, sudden, and striking pressure of their fingertips on the keys that causes the massive changes required to get the information all the way from the keyboard to the processor or whatever.

You can hear them typing a mile away. And it's not a pleasant sound. It has the sound of urgency, of emergency. It sounds like "Yikes! Hey! Pay attention! There's something happening! Over here! Look over here! HEY! What are you. . . HEY!"

It's incredible annoying. It's mostly older guys who do it, though I've seen women do it too; clearly there's a wide range of culprits. Today I happened to look over at someone doing this (OK, I happened to glare at him in frustration, I admit it) and I realized he was typing with only his index fingers. And then I realized the other main offender of the day is also typing with only his index fingers. So you see how it happens: you're using only two fingers, you gotta move them FAST to get any typing speed going at all. So it's POUND POUND POUND.

Listen people, there's no mystery here: just start using all your fingers. You'll get used to it, learn where the keys are, start typing like a normal person. And we'll all be grateful. I promise.

Thinking Of You, Harriet McBryde Johnson

2008-06-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

Harriet McBryde Johnson died yesterday. That's a picture of her book above; that's a picture of her, on the cover. She was 50.

HBJ was a disabled activist and lawyer who wrote a fascinating piece in the Times Magazine some years ago about what it's like to be disabled and why everyone should stop being so patronizing, dumb, and basically evil about the way they think about disability.

Link to Times Obit is here; Magazine article by her is here.

Her Times piece had a big effect on me when I read it. Partly the piece describes her response to Peter Singer, who argues in his philosophical writings that if a baby is destined to live a life of great pain and suffering, it is ethical to bring about its death. She and her colleagues say such decisions are never appropriate.

It wasn't so much that she convinced me that there was something fundamental mistaken about Singer's line of thought. It was more that her description of her life, and the way she thought about her life, made me think that we have no clue, whatsoever, about how other people feel and live.

In the essays she describes her life as a lawyer, and the range of very ordinary pleasures she enjoys, like doing her work, walking around town, hanging out with her pals. She makes vivid and clear that even though she's all bent over in a wheelchair, and can't get up to pee, and has to have her food mushed up for her, her life is just a really ordinary and happy one.

It goes to show you, people are really bad at making sense of other people's lives. She explains in her essay how often people would come right out and say things like, "Oh, how can you live like that!" Duh, people.

You can philosophize all you want on either side of the mind-body problem, or what it is to have mental states, or how we know about other people, and then you get this brute fact: a person many people would immediately judge to be feeling awful all the time and terribly depressed is really just, you know, a normal person.

You can philosophize, too, all you want, about where to draw the lines when it comes to making decisions about health, and life, and so on, but this total inability we have to judge the quality of someone's life suggests to me at least one rule: if there's a person can make a decision for themselves about whether, and how, to live, we should trust them, enable them, to do so.

HBJ was an atheist, and certainly a rabble-rouser, so I didn't want to title this post "RIP HMJ." But yeah, I'm thinking of you.

Going Keyless

2008-06-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

Now the story can be told.

So anybody who knows me, which is everybody reading this, knows that in periods of mild distress, the first thing to go is my keys. Which is why there was a period in early 2006 when I had a crush on my locksmith.

Friday night I was walking home from work, when I got honked at by some co-workers, and spent a couple hours shooting the shit, being fed, drinking a beer or two. Then I got dropped off at home. The person dropping me off asked if I had my keys. I cheerily said I did. But, in fact, I did not.

Here we come to the part that, for me, seems inextricably linked to living in a smaller town, but probably isn't. In L.A., when I locked myself out the locksmith was my only friend. Here, I had left the window open, which meant that with some surprisingly deft manipulation of the screen, I was in like Flynn.

It was the weekend, and I had left my keys in my office, which is locked on the weekend. I have the key, in theory, but, at that moment, obviously not in the particular.

And so I spent the weekend without my keys, and went in on Monday leaving my apartment unlocked (it can only be locked from the outside, although I can lock it if I'm in it) and then on Monday I forgot, again, to bring my keys home with me.

It was, I'll admit, kind of annoying and mildly nerve-wracking. But it was disorienting to realize that it wasn't that big a deal. Nothing in my life was that different without my keys, especially given that I do shit like leave my ground floor window open.

There is no real point to this anecdote, but it felt like a parable of some kind.

It's Quantity, Too

2008-06-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

This is not meant to be a series of posts like dude-Paris-is-so-great I'm-going-to-become-an-expat oh-the-US-is-so-boring. Cause honestly, no one loves the US like I do. The US is the shit, and I can't wait to get back there.

But. There are, you know, a few areas in which the US could use improvement. And some of these are areas France feels like the savvy and suave wise man to our bumbling adolescent.

One area is the objectification of women, especially in advertising. OK, surprising, since France is fashion-central, and whatever. But every time I come here I'm amazed by how relaxing it is not to be constantly bombarded with images of semi-naked women. It feels good. You really do stop thinking so much about your female bodily deficiencies when you're not surrounded by this shit.

It's not just the quality of the ads -- though that is different. It's the quantity, too. I feel like the relentlessness of depictions of women being all sexy and cute and harmless and physically perfect in North America is just wearing me out.

Here in Paris there are a few giant ads in the Metro for some skin thing for summer and they do show some naked woman lying on her back. But you know, she's huge, and all muscular, and shiny. She looks ready to sunbathe, or get into a fight, not ready to smile softly and cheer your team of choice.

But there are also two other ads that are everywhere that show men. One of them is a goofball ad showing a guy in just his underwear trying to deal with his 20 electronic devices and cords. It's funny and cute. Guy is sort of buff but normal looking.

The other of them is this Dior ad, for "Eau Sauvage."

Hey, I like it. I'm not against objectification of persons for advertising. It's the cumulative effect that's driving me nuts back home.

A little variety, OK guys?

Oldness

2008-06-09T20:54:00.000-07:00

So I definitely fall, these days, into the adult rather than kid category as far as social expectations are concerned, which leaves me wondering if I am, in fact, sufficiently adult.

I mean, I have a job these days, so that's something. But there's all this shit that I do that felt kind of charming and carefree when I was a young person and now that I'm older I feel stranger about it. Especially when I'm wearing my work clothes. Like the other night I found myself locked out of my apartment and so I removed the screen and climbed in through the window. Or today I stopped and got an ice cream cone on the way home and it was dripping all over the place and I walked through the streets with my slacks and my shirt and sticky and slightly dirty hands.

I don't know. I don't know where precisely to draw those lines. I always hated those books where it was supposed to be liberating to be free from the constraints of adult life, although as someone who stopped working for eight months last year maybe I should have different feelings about it.

I guess I feel, which will come as no surprise to anyone, that these things are harder on women, that an adult woman is supposed to be more poised and seamless than an adult male, who is allowed all kinds of boyish charm, random obsessiveness, and sloppiness.

Paris: Some Images

2008-06-09T05:30:00.001-07:00

OK, so I wrote before about how stylish Paris is, and how fun that makes the city, and yada yada yada, and of course it was the perfect post for some images but I didn't post any. I don't know what I was thinking. But rather than show you a bunch of photos-of-Paris of the kind you can find anywhere on the web, I want to call your attention first to the RATP logo, which exemplifies just what I was talking about.

RATP is the public transport system of Paris, so the logo is everywhere, especially on the Metro. Here's it is:

Mmm, isn't that something?

I've been told that literally, it's a depiction of the region it serves: the circle is Paris, and the blue line is the Seine.

But it seems to also be a kind of take-off on the London Underground symbol, you know, the circle with the line through it? Similar, but totally different.

Also, it looks sort of like a person's face, pointing up, doesn't it? You know, in profile?

And finally, it's just really just kind of a pleasing and soothing image. I love it.

Next is a picture of one of my favorite places in Paris, the open indoor space of the Pompidou museum.

It's not a great picture because what I was really trying to photograph is this thing in the middle, which is a work of art, that spins, with a heavy weight attached that looks like it's about to detach itself and bring death and mayhem to all the museum-goers. I tried to take a picture of the spinning part but it was too fast/small/blurry to come out so you can't see it here. Weird, disturbing, interesting!

And finally, since Paris is so, you know, historical and all, I here's a plaque from the Sorbonne showing some important ancestry:

Now we know why he always has that kind of pomadour hairstyle:

Beavis est mort. Vive Beavis!

Creative Self-Promoting Nomads

2008-06-07T03:53:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman wrote recently in his Times column about the "Grateful Dead Economy" we're all heading toward.

In the era of cheap and easy digital copying, he says, it's going to become impossible to charge more than a nominal free for anything that can be digitized. In music this is already happening, but books loom on the horizon.

As we all know, The Dead allowed free copying for years, choosing to make their money by touring, performing, and selling stuff. It worked well.

Krugman says that's where we're all headed. As soon as we've all got our digital book readers, writers will have to write just to create buzz for other, lucrative activities, like "giving readings."

(The Amazon Kindle. Um, not a very attractive object, is it?)

He writes, "Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me."

He may be right about the inevitability part. I mean, I'm all for easing copyright, and I think it's true that the crazed impulse to protect all works at all times is dumb. There's no question that some of the greatest things out there are mixtures of other things, and that trying to model intellectual property in the old "one work, one author, one owner" kind of way is no longer going to work.

But still, Krugman's column seems overly sanguine about the whole thing. I can see some immediate and appalling aspects to the future he is describing.

To make money from live performance requires an insane amount of traveling around. You're telling me anyone who wants to be a novelist or essay writer or scholar is going to have to get one of those tour buses and go from town to town?

A) An environmental disaster.

B) What about the children?

Also, I kind of doubt people are actually going to pony up cash in the necessary amounts to hear readings. I mean, I love novels probably more than anyone I know, and I read a ton, and I wouldn't pay anything to go hear a reading. Indeed, I wouldn't go to a reading if it was free.

I like to read. What do I care about the writer's voice, or presence, or whatever? I've been to one author appearance in my life, and it was Erica Jong, and as much as I love Fear of Flying, it was a total waste of time. The people in the audience asked moronic questions, and she tried to answer them, and she plugged her next book, and signed some copies, and we all left. I was like, "I wasted an afternoon for that?"

Of course, there's also the babe factor. If authors make money from readings, we all know who's going to survive: the tall, blond cleavage-y female writing a book about sex.

Is this really a future to accept with equanimity? No. We may have to accept it, but can't we go kicking and screaming instead?

Style

2008-06-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those totally devoted Mac users who can't understand why anyone would buy a PC. And what I always say about using a Mac is that it comes down to style: not just the style of the physical object, but also the style of the computer interaction. Both are always lovely on a Mac: elegant, simple, fun, and pleasing.

To my mind, this transforms the whole using-a-computer experience, from "slightly annoying" to "pretty great." And if you use your computer a lot, don't you want the experience to be pretty great all the time? Think of the net increase in your pleasure over a year.

Of course, the big argument on the other side is supposed to be something like this: Macs are more expensive for "the same features." All that extra money is just for style, and who cares about that? It's substance that's important, right?

It's a surprisingly common line of thought, at least around the academics and thinker types I hang around with. There's something vaguely not right, they say, with caring about style over substance. It's almost a little morally suspicious. It's just style! they say. It's not real!

But you know, it's funny, because I am visiting Paris right now for three weeks and pretty much everyone I have told has reacted in the same way, "Oh, Paris! You're so lucky! What a wonderful place!"

And it is a wonderful place. But seriously, most of what's wonderful about it is it's got style. Not flash, exactly, because Parisian style isn't really flashy. But things are just cool here: buildings are pretty; streets are laid out in a pleasing way; the various machines you deal with to get your subway tickets or whatever are fun to use; the people look good and are wearing nice clothes. The food and wine are good.

It makes life fun. It makes a twenty minute walk to the store and back a pleasure rather than a chore; it makes a ride on the subway a mini-treat rather than a pain-in-the-ass; it makes an espresso after lunch a delight rather than an exercise in avoiding the caramel mocha latte or whatever.

And think of the money you save, not having a car, not driving, and not going to Starbucks. Sure, Macs are expensive, but they last forever, and more amazingly, they stay fun to use.

Style. Good for you, good for your pocketbook, good for the environment.

What If You Are Special?

2008-05-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

OK, so there's this way of thinking that goes like this: if you don't know whether you're "typical" or special with respect to some unknown thing, then you should assume you're typical.

Since, you know, odds are that you are typical.

So, for instance, when people talk about crazy shit like the end of the world, they use this reasoning to predict "with 95% "confidence", that humanity will disappear within 9120 years." That's from the Wikipedia entry on Doomsday arguments. The idea is that you and I probably aren't among the very first people to live, and we're probably not among the very last people to live. Probably. So, probably, we're somewhere in the middle. Which if you add in a few
assumptions, leads to the 9120 number.

Then also there's that book I wrote about before on C and C, Stumbling on Happiness. There, Dan Gilbert says that since most people are really bad at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make you, you should inform yourself by asking how happy or unhappy that same thing made other people.

So, if you're not sure how upsetting it will be when your team loses, or how happy you'll be when you get a raise, you should just check with someone else whose team lost and who got a raise.

This assumes you're pretty typical, which, probabilistically is probably a pretty safe assumption. But what if you're not? If you're not typical, there's no way to reason yourself out of a clearly false conclusion.

So maybe you know that, statistically, almost everyone is happier being married. It seems to follow that in the absence of knowledge of your own specialness, you too should assume you will be happier married. But if you're in the minority of people who just isn't going to be happier being married, well, there's no way you could factor that in. There's no way not to come to the wrong conclusions.

It almost makes you think there's something fishy about the whole thing. I mean, if I don't know anything about how typical I am, how can I assign a probability to my own typicality? Maybe I'm so underinformed about my own typicality that I should just assume ignorance.

In that case, coming up against questions like whether to get married, you'd have to guess, you know, or punt. Kind of wing it. At least then there would be the off chance that if you're atypical, you'll make an atypical decision. And maybe live happily ever after, who knows?

Unless, of course, the world comes to an end.

Lucky, Good, Etc.

2008-05-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

So the Lakers won last night, if you weren't paying attention, by three points, on a non-call on a foul by Derek Fisher on Brent Barry. The only reason I know it's a foul is because the TNT guys told me it was, otherwise I wouldn't have known. Also they told me that Barry didn't deserve to get the call because he didn't dive into Fisher and he didn't sell the foul and he put the ball on the floor.

Anyway, I don't have a particular problem with the non-call because, as Phil Jackson pointed out, the shot clock should have reset for the Lakers on an earlier play and then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Also, the Lakers played a lot better than the Spurs, and if the Spurs had played a little better we wouldn't be having this discussion.

But still I had flashbacks to that one game a while back against Sacramento where the Lakers got bailed out by the refs, and my friends, Lakers haters to a man (or woman), rode me unmercilessly about it.

I think I spent the aftermath in that game pretty much in denial. I wanted to believe that it was completely fair that the Lakers won, that they deserved each and every one of those calls.

It's been a few years, and I demand less of the world around me. I'm prepared to admit my team got a few calls, a few lucky bounces of the ball. I still kind of have an internal issue thought. Would I rather the Lakers win in a non-heroic kind of way, does the win mean that much, or would I rather they not win? How about if they didn't win in a super-heroic way? Would I rather root for a team of martyrs, or a team of plutocrats?

I don't know. It doesn't matter that much. I hate goddamn Tony Parker, though.

The Andy Rooney Hour

2008-05-27T15:13:00.001-07:00

You know what I hate? People who can't be bothered to open the door for themselves. You're at a two-way, two person, in-out door. . . the kind of door where one person can be going in at the same time another person is going out. And someone is coming right at you. You're going out: you push open the door on your right, figuring the other person can pull open the door on his right, and you can have, like, simultaneous useful door experiences.

But what does he do? He stands in front of you, waiting for you do open your door. He gets in your way, and grabs the open door. He waits for you to struggle past him, then surges in past you. Sometimes these people even say "Thanks," as if you are holding the door for them.

Dude, I'm not holding the door. I'm passing through it. And that evil look of menace is because I'm thinking, "You're a healthy young person! Open your own god-damned door and get out of my way! It's not going to kill you!"

'Cause you know, young people are the worst offenders. I was just on campus this morning and had like five door experiences like this and then I took the subway downtown to the financial district and all the grown-ups just pulled open their own doors. Like normal people.

I'm even more annoyed when people use those handicapped door-openers -- also something that is huge on college campuses. iPod in ears, backpack on back, two free hands, person uses hip to bump up against the blue button to electronically open the door. Young environmentalists my ass. Also those things break all the time, and then actual handicapped people can't get in!

If you can open the door, open the door.

I also hate when people eat with their faces right in their food and when bicyclists ride on the sidewalk and are rude about it. Yesterday I made a little noise of annoyance at a bicyclist on the sidewalk as he rudely rode past me -- going quickly! on a very crowded sidewalk! without looking! -- and what did he do? He made the noise right back at me.

That was actually kind of funny and I had to give him credit. But not so much that I think it's OK to crash into people on the sidewalk. If you must bring your bike on the sidewalk, please treat pedestrians with care!

And get off my lawn, you kids!

A Bar-Raiser From Way Back

2008-05-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

Me. I'm a bar-raiser from way back. That is, I raise the bar.

When I first started graduate school, it was basically to get health insurance and reasonable work. When I switched to studying philosophy at age 30, I thought, well, whatever; I'd rather have a loser job and a degree in philosophy than a loser job and no degree in philosophy. At that time, I was about 15 pounds heavier than I am now -- quite plump -- and I never exercised. I smoked.

I remember the first time I went to a professional conference on my department's dime. The conference was in the Hilton, or the Hyatt, or something; I hadn't stayed in a place like that ever in my life. "Oh My God," I thought. This is the life. I might even get to do this again!

Sure, well, now I go to our professional conferences three times a year: we have one in the West, one in the East, and one in the middle. I go to all of them. I have a research fund. And I'm all, "What do you mean I gotta pay extra to work out? What? There's no hot tub?!"

I don't have a loser job; in fact I'm a philosophy professor. I live in a fun big city. I've lost some weight; I exercise; I don't smoke. I never dreamed things could turn out so well.

So. Do I spend my days in goggle-eyed amazement and happiness? No.

What I do is compare myself to people who are way ahead of me -- teach at better places, have written more stuff, have other accomplishments like children or speaking five languages -- and I say to myself, "Why am I so behind?"

Poor me! Waah! Time is running out and I'm so behind, boo-hoo!

It's completely ridiculous. But I can't help it: I'm raising the bar. If I've got a good job, I want a better one. If I look pretty good, I want to look great. If I travel to France every year, I want to go to Italy.

It's moronic. All I can say in my own defense is that almost everyone else is just as bad, as far as I can tell.

So there.

Why I Am Not A Blogger

2008-05-24T14:20:00.001-07:00

OK, so of course I am a blogger, insofar as I write here at C and C, and this is a blog.

But I've never thought of this as a "weblog," -- as a diary, or a running commentary on my life, or a running commentary on anything, really. I just figured I had a few thoughts I wanted to set down occasionally, that I'd like other people to read, and that this would be an appropriate and simple format in which to make that happen.

So I didn't start out thinking of anything as "timely" or even time-sensitive, or current.

But I'm struck by the way the format imposes its own rules. I mean, when I read things in blog format, I always want to read what's "today," and not what's "yesterday." There's no real reason for this; I mean, a lot of what people are thinking on Feb 23 is just as interesting on May 6 as it is in February. Not everything, but a lot.

At first I thought this was a kind of news-obsession: people want what's new. But then I started to see it as more akin to "Doing today's crossword" than "Reading today's news." The February Times crossword isn't any less inherently interesting in May than it is in February, and yet, darn it, I want to do today's puzzle.

A big part of that pleasure, for me, is doing the puzzle of today: doing the puzzle everyone else is doing. It's the same thing that makes TV and radio more fun than video. At least to me. I like the feeling of watching what's on.

Reading current blog posts is like reading what's on.

But see, then, if you're writing a blog, you get sucked in by that, to producing in a what's-on, what's-the-news, what's-happening-now sort of way.

But as with most people's lives, my life doesn't have a lot that's new. One day is pretty much like the previous day.

Ideally, I guess a blogger would have a stock of ideas, and present them in conjunction with current events and news and opinions related to those ideas. Like if you have something you want to say about sex, and it turns out to be the 10th anniversary of Viagra, that's perfect.

But that requires a lot of mental energy and outward attentiveness. Like, you gotta pay attention to what's going on. Out there in the world.

I'm not interested enough in the outside world to pay that kind of attention. I read the New York Times pretty regularly, and usually some local paper wherever I am. On the internet, there are like five sites I like to visit regularly. Otherwise I get bored. In fact, I am really easily bored, which is what I was going to write about today before I got distracted thinking about how not-timely, not-current, and, well, boring that was as a topic.

So in spite of everything, I wish there was some format on the internet that was less blog-like. Like a page, with categories, where stuff gets added, and a person visiting for the first time would see a topical arrangement of things rather than a chronological one. I guess this is sort of what social networking is about, but I don't want the social networking part, just the page part.

Sort of like a Myspace page without the Myspace.

Which reminds me, I was visiting Connecticut recently and there was a giant sign on a church: Come visit myspace! My space being the church, I'm guessing the author was Himself. Wouldn't that be awesome if there really were supernatural beings with webpages?

I can see it now: God's page on Facebook, with injunctions to love one another and live a good life, and the comments section with people complaining, "Dude, you're so self-absorbed!" "You suck!" "And you're fat!" "Get a life!"

People. They're kind of awesome but they're also kind of a pain-in-the-ass.

The True Fantasies Of Young Men

2008-05-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago I read this graphic novel, Lily. The picture is above.

It's about a girl who is visited by four of her other selves: three future selves and one past self. They all have things to work out, issues, whatever.

I couldn't help but notice it's written by a guy. And illustrated by a guy.

That's fine. It's a good book, mostly, with interesting characters and a nice drawing style.

But I found myself noticing something about the story, guy-wise.

****Spoiler Alert*****

What happens in the book is that the girl is in high school, and she has a major crush on her dreamboat theater teacher. She's friends with a well-meaning but awkward guy her own age, who is in love with her. It's obvious to everyone that he is in love, but the girl doesn't notice. She's wrapped up in Mister Drama.

A big part of the story is that the 80-year-old self lets on to the teen self that she spent her life alone and lonely, and kicking herself for not pursuing the Nice Teen Guy. The older woman basically re-engineers the main character's life so that she recognizes Teen Guy for the gem he is, and goes out with him.

Um, OK. But I couldn't help but think this was kind of a guy's view of things. . . That girl who won't give you the time of day? Wouldn't it be awesome if she ends up alone and sad because she wouldn't date you? Wouldn't it be awesomer if she could know, now, that she'll end up alone and sad without out, and change her ways?

It also has that element of, you know, the only reason she's not dating the Teen Guy is that she's got her eye on Drama Teacher. You know, like she's just distracted. Sure, show her a good thing, she'll just, change her mind. "Oh, Johnny, now I love you! I wasn't paying attention!"

I know women are often attracted to bad guys and often not attracted to nice guys, especially when they're in high school, but I don't think just pointing out the error, or even threatening girls with life-long loneliness, is really going to change anything. So this book? Maybe kind of a Guy Fantasy. And not in a good way.

Some Thoughts While Watching Basketball

2008-05-19T18:33:00.001-07:00

It's something really hot here in Bakersfield, CA and I've got the air-conditioning going, and the Hornets are four points down to the Spurs, and it's all a little strange. A minute ago the Hornets were on a perfect cinematic run against the always semi-villainous Spurs and I was getting really into it, but now it's turned back into a normal basketball game.

I haven't blogged in a while; I haven't done Sudoku and I'm feeling a little adrift, because I have a deadly habit of identifying myself by my activities. I am someone who puts numbers in little boxes or I am somebody who roots for the Lakers in an active and semi-knowledgeable way or whatever. But you get into stuff and you get out of it and all you're really left with is the knowledge that Dell Curry was that player with the little white patch of hair.

One of those new WNBA commercials just came on, in which the various WNBA players mouth the most commonly held opinions about the WNBA, with footage that contradicts the words. E.g. "girls don't play defense" and then you watch the player in question knock somebody down.

Chris Paul just made a buzzer beater, we think. I don't know. There's so much about the world that I don't have a clue about, and it bothers me that it just keeps moving and changing and there are even more things that I won't know, like just how good Chris Paul is.

Bad Habits: A Theory

2008-05-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

I have a theory about why it's so hard to quit bad habits.

My theory is this:

For a habit to be a "bad" habit, there has to be something that makes it bad -- there's something about the consequences of engaging the habit that are undesirable.

Often, the reason the consequences are undesirable is because of some defect, weakness, or imperfection in one's self.

Quitting the bad habit is only necessary because of this imperfection. But to enforce a decision to quit often requires continued mental focus on the reason it's a bad habit. That is, on a defect or imperfection.

But reflecting on defects and imperfections is not only unpleasant, it's also just the kind of thing that makes you want to engage in bad habits. Indeed, engaging in the bad habits is a kind of way of pretending that you don't have the imperfection at all.

When I was a teenager, I often didn't wear a seat belt. (Don't worry, I always wear one now.) Part of the reason, psychologically, was that choosing to put on the seat belt required me to consciously acknowledge that I was mortal, and indeed, was about to put myself in danger of death and grave injury. I didn't want to think about that. Not wearing the seat belt you can pretend you are immortal.

Now, I'd like to lose weight. But choosing not to indulge my hi-carb tastes means reflecting on the fact that I am not happy the way I am. I have to keep in mind that I am not the weight I want to be. It's not a nice fact to reflect on. I'd rather ignore it. If I ignore it, I can pretend I am just perfect - - indeed, I can pretend I am the kind of being for whom eating doesn't even lead to bad consequences at all.

Even dealing with my teeth makes me conscious of death in a way I find hard to handle. I am decaying. Eventually I will die. Who can deal with any of it? But don't you have to face up to it to be motivated to floss?

Honestly, it's exhausting. It's no wonder given half a chance we're the overindulgers we are, driving around talking on our cell phones with the music playing.

Just trying to drown out death! No big deal! Carry on!

Oh Canada

2008-05-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

This is where you get really happy about Canada:

Some poor family was traveling from the Philippines to settle in Canada, and during a rushed connection they left their small child behind. I guess the father thought the kid -- a toddler -- was with the wife and grandparents, and the grandparents thought he was with the father.

The Yahoo story included this passage:

"According to the Vancouver Sun, airport security found a Tagalog-speaking Air Canada agent who looked after the child while his father flew 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) back to Vancouver to pick him up and then return to Winnipeg to rejoin the immigrant family on their first day in Canada."

The best thing about Canada is that things that would be a major trauma in the United States are just normal things people deal with here. Right: they found an agent who spoke the kid's language and got the family back together. No problem.

It reminds me of this thing at my gym, where for a couple of hours every couple of days there's a no-males-allowed-in-the-women's-section thing. Normally guys are allowed in to act as personal trainers or whatever, but since there are some Muslim women who want to work out without guys around, there's a few hours where no men are allowed. There's a little hand-made sign explaining.

As you all know, I love the US . But you just know that in the States there would be a federal case about something like this. Here, it's the quietest of compromises.

It's just no big deal, eh?

Irrationality: What Is The Deal?

2008-05-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

Today I did something that is a paradigm case of irrational behavior. I was in line at Starbucks, and although I wasn't exactly hungry, I wanted something. Along with my coffee I ordered a chocolate doughnut. I know from previous Starbucks adventures that those chocolate doughnuts are mm mm good.

I brought it back to my table, and I did some stuff on my computer, and I drank my coffee. The work I was doing was pretty absorbing, and I found myself sort of forgetting about my doughnut. After a little while had passed, I actually was hungry. I hate eating sugary sweets on an empty stomach; it always makes me feel kind of sick. What I really wanted then was a small, pre-workout, healthy snack. In the mall where my gym is there's a food court, and in the food court there's a sushi place that is super-convenient, and at the sushi place they sell these little snack-sized packs of nigiri. About $3.75 plus tax. They're kind of the perfect little snack.

I decided I'd wait, have a sushi snack, digest a bit, and then go to the gym. Now, the thing is, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking when I ordered the doughnut, because I'm trying to lose weight, and as I said, I wasn't even hungry.

So when I realized it was in my power to forgo the doughnut, the idea of giving it up grabbed me in a big way. So what did I do?

I threw it away. In the garbage.

If you were trying to come up with an example of someone who behaved irrationally, in the sense of being self-undermining, this is a textbook case.

So. What happened? Was it

1) I "changed my mind" twice: once when I went from "I'm watching my weight" to "I'll take that doughut" and once when I threw it away.

2) I suffered from "weakness of will" when I ordered the doughnut, and the will magically reappeared in time for me to throw the doughnut away.

3) I was never sufficiently committed to watching my weight, or to eating the doughnut.

I'm asking seriously. Socrates is famous for having thinking there is no such thing as 2) -- you always do as you just best at the moment, so the problem is with your judging not your asking.

Some other philosophers think 3) is right, but I've always had my doubts. I don't need full commitment to things to carry them out, do I? I mean, it wouldn't be better to be "wholehearted" about doughnut eating, would it?

I'm thinking maybe it's 1). And then, what I don't get is, how are you supposed to know when your changing your mind is going to lead you down the path of utter ridiculousness? Or isn't that something to worry about?

Respect And Negativity

2008-05-12T13:49:00.001-07:00

Here's what I feel kind of blindsided me about getting older: to get respect and admiration, you have to make other people feel bad.

When you're young, it's easier. If you do great on an exam, and your friend does poorly, it's sad for your friend, but it's not that big of a deal. Everyone tells themselves, well, he'll find something else he's better at; everyone's got their own talents; everyone takes time to come into his own.

But if you're in your forties, and you're doing great at something and your friend is doing poorly, it's much weirder. Because, really, what else are they going to do? This is kind of it. Even in a micro-way, when you've got a group of people who basically like one another, and one of them does something great, there's always that undercurrent of worry and jealousy. I mean, I know there's worry and jealousy when you're young, too, but somehow the stakes are weirder and higher as you get older.

Even more upsetting to me than these little negativities are the ways most interesting jobs actually require you to make other people feel bad -- or at least make them feel frustrated, or annoyed, or resentful.

I work as a professor. It's my job, in teaching, to do lots of things I know will make my students feel bad. Indeed, if they're completely satisfied, and unmotivated to try to do things differently, I've sort of failed, because I'm supposed to make them make an effort to improve. It's also my job, in research, to make arguments showing that other people's arguments are wrong.

I feel like the amount of the respect and admiration I get for a job well done is directly correlated with how much negativity I'm able to put out there.

When you're young, you can have respect and admiration on the basis of promise: oooh, this person's bright, she's going to go far! This kind of respect and admiration can co-exist with no one feeling bad, because, you know, the person hasn't really done anything yet. It's all still to come.

As you get older, though, you gotta deliver. And then, either you lose, or someone else loses.

Either way, you got yourself some bad feeling. Among the gazillion other reasons I think women find it harder and harder as they move up various work hierarchies, I think this is one. Whatever you think about the genetics, we are directly socialized not to want to make people feel bad. So we back off. We back off, and then we're not doing our jobs. And we all know what comes next.

The only job I could think of where making people feel bad isn't part of doing a good job is being a doctor. Or maybe a nurse. Maybe I should drop everything and go back to medical school?

What Are We Drinking?

2008-05-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

So when you turn on the tap here, the water comes out into whatever receptacle you put it into with a kind of white froth on the top.

I am not really squeamish, and I feel like the Britta filter, in my incompetent hands, is more of a problem than a solution because I never change the filter and so wind up drinking little charcoal particles. Still, lines must be drawn, and the foam is starting to get to me, as is the guy who talked to me about the blisters on his hand and the kid with a staph infection.

Do I care? Should I care? I dropped my tuna sandwich on the ground today and picked it up and ate it. These are some of the core principles of my upbringing, and I stand by them. Nevertheless, every now and then I think I should care more.

Now, I guess, would be a time to wonder about my absolute phobia of infesting bugs: lice, bed bugs, etc. All those teeming masses. When I am very anxious I wake up in the middle of the night convinced that I have bed bugs and I tear the covers apart hunting for imaginary bugs.

Sometimes, here, the whole city smells vaguely of manure. It's not as bad as it sounds, the effect, but it's a little strange, because at first you think it's something specific that happened near you, but instead it's just a product of the direction the wind is blowing.

Now Everyone Is Famous Forever

2008-05-09T12:47:00.001-07:00

Chuck Klosterman had perceptive essay in last month's Esquire (you know, the issue with the annoying picture of Jessica Simpson shaving?)

His theme is that "Teenage superstar Hannah Montana would be nothing without the Internet. In fact, she is the Internet."

OK, I sort of had a vague idea who Hannah Montana was, but I didn't know the show was about a girl acting as a character. That is, I didn't know that in the show there was Hannah Montana the girl and Hannah Montana the star and that Miley Cyrus plays both of them.

Klosterman says the reason the show is so spectacularly popular is that HM is dealing with a problem every teenager currently has: how to finesse the co-existence of your real, personal life with your created, public image on the internet.

If you have an internet presence, you're crafting an online identity. And this raises all kinds of questions: how much reality goes into that identity? Does it matter? What happens when people meet the real you? Should they?

Klosterman says, the show "premiered at a specific point in history when millions of young people arbitrarily decided they were 'kind of famous.' Most of them would never say that overtly, because no reasonable person ever would. But this is how they feel."

Clever. That may well be true.

I thought of this article the other day when I was reading the Toronto Globe and Mail, and their "Life" section had a story on how lots of people (read: Americans) are paying for professional retouching for their photos on Facebook and Myspace. It made me think, Chuck K. is right: celebrity isn't just for celebrities anymore; it's for everyone.

Disorientated

2008-05-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

There are some things that just don't come naturally to me. Which is something I was thinking about as I was hanging my suit pants up this evening, because although I know which way I want my pants on their hangers to face, I always hang them up differently, every time. I have no built-in sense of how to attach the pants to the hangers so that they face the way I think they should look. Which is a little strange, because I hang my pants up a lot.

I guess the kind of triviality this embodies is hardly worth mentioning, but I feel like there's a lot of that floating around in my life, things that I do often that I don't have a system for, or that I have a system for that fails often.

Example: I lock myself out more than the average person. Once I locked myself out four times in a month. That was exceptional, and probably a cry for help. But still. Since I moved to Bakersfield I have left my keys in my office twice.

If you make these kinds of mistakes you get good at retrieving them; I have excellent mistake-fixing skills. But there's still something upsetting about that since of friction in the way you move through life; it makes everything seem a little off.

Quitting Quitting: My Diet Coke Habit

2008-05-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'm quitting quitting Diet Coke.

I love Diet Coke. Actually, I love diet sodas of all kinds. Now that I think of it, I love artificial sweetener in almost anything.

To me, artificial sweeteners are infinitely superior in flavor to sugar and corn syrup - at least in beverages. I don't know how they are in, like, baked goods and candy. Maybe not as good. But in drinks, oh boy, give me Splenda, give me Nutrasweet, hell, give me saccharine for that matter.

Artificial sweeteners are light where sugar is heavy. They're smooth where sugar is sticky. They're the foxy to sugar's lumpen. Diet soda is thirst-quenching and perfect where regular soda is like eating a cough drop.

A couple of months ago I tried to give up diet soda, and artificial sweeteners generally. I had three reasons:

1) Some research shows they're maybe not that good for you, and research definitely shows that all the phosphorous in cola drinks is not good for you in large quantities. Since Diet Coke was my main soda of choice, I was drinking a lot of goddamn phosphorous.

2) Some research shows that the sweet flavor screws up your insulin, and you end up eating more to make up for it. I admit it: I thought, well, maybe I can lose a few pounds this way.

3) For me diet soda goes naturally with all kinds of other junky food, like french fries, and chips, and pizza. If I drank water, I figured, I'd eat a salad.

Well, it doesn't take an expert on human psychology to figure out that 3) was going to be middling at best. Basically I found other junky foods to eat -- sweet ones instead of salty ones.

And perhaps because of this, I didn't "lose a few pounds." If anything, I gained a few. Now, it's possible I gained a few pounds in spite of giving up diet soda, not because of it. We'll never know. But the increase in my jam and cookie consumption suggests otherwise. So 2) was kind of a bust.

That leaves 1). Still a good reason, but not enough to motivate the true lover of diet soda. It's just too abstract.

So I'm giving up giving it up.

Last night I went to see Iron Man, and I was kind of peckish in that late-afternoon-you-don't-really-need-popcorn-but-ooh-you-want-some kind of way. Since I gave up giving it up, I ordered up a nice, small, Diet Coke. (Which came to $3.71 Canadian. I know, I know, but Wow!)

The Diet Coke was delicious and perfect and calorie-free. The movie was awesome. And Robert Downey Jr., well, let's just say it was a perfect trifecta of pleasures.

I'm An Anti-Hoarder

2008-05-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

Some people have a psychological problem where they can't throw anything away. They're hoarders.

I have a psychological problem where I can't not throw things away. I'm an anti-hoarder. A thrower-awayer. A de-clutterer. A house purger.

I get a serious kick out of getting rid of stuff, and I get a serious case of the heebie-jeebies when I'm around a lot of cluttery junk. I almost enjoy getting rid of stuff as much as I enjoy buying stuff. Not quite, but almost.

Yesterday I did a major house purge. It was awesome.

I threw away pieces of paper. I threw away old towels that could have been still useful, but were too ratty to donate to the thrift store. I threw away some pajamas tops that I'd bought at a thrift store that couldn't be washed with anything else and thus were driving me crazy.

I made a giant stack of books to take to the used bookstore. I live in a smallish space, and I'm determined not to buy any more bookshelves, so now that I've got some new books I had to get rid of some old ones. Mostly I'm getting rid of novels I started and hated, or novels I sort of enjoyed but were too stupid to want to keep around the house. I say it's a resolution, but the truth is, I was excited and happy to get rid of these books.

I threw away an old wood cutting board that had gotten all moldy-colored on the bottom. I threw away an apple corer that I never use because I prefer knives. I threw away a cookie cutter in the shape of a buffalo. Cute, but when's the last time I made cookies? Never.

Those last two kitchen items were the only thing I felt bad about throwing away. They could have been used; in a perfect world I'd have found a new home for them. But there were only two of them, and they were small, and I was lazy. In the trash they went.

In a kind of fit of craziness, I threw away old mementos and letters. Who needs them? After all, I'm anti-nostalgia. That's when I started to think, "Maybe I am insane?"

Because the truth is I've gotten carried away before. Absurdly, my need to purge extends to my digital life, and I often delete old electronic documents. Once I accidentally deleted all my copies of my CV and I had to remake it from scratch.

Overall, though, I'd say the house purging desire is a healthy one, and only occasionally does it veer into madness. And if I ever get tired of being a professor, I figure I can become a professional. I would love to go throw other people's stuff away.

The only real thorn in my side, house-purging-wise, is the environment. When I was a kid my father did a yearly house purge, bringing the same pleasure to the task that I now bring to my own. "If in doubt, throw it out!" he'd chant, while dumping old boxes of crayons, markers, and half-used pads of paper. "We'll get new ones if we want!" he'd say.

I would love, love, love to throw away old pens, half-used boxes of greeting cards, packages of mailing labels, and old pads of paper. But the thought of the land-fill stops me. I'm proud to say I've got a half-used box of greeting cards that I've had for about ten years, sitting in my drawer. Ten years! I use one of them every so often. I've thought of trashing them about seventeen times. How's that for the triumph of rationality over desire, guys?

Impressive!

Some Blogger, I Don't Know . . .

2008-05-01T18:47:00.001-07:00

I read The New Yorker regularly, and I thought the April 21st issue was full of great, or at least interesting, things. I loved reading about the tigers. I loved the crazy journey to China to see how toy puffins are made. I loved the elevator story. (Sample excellent sentence from the elevator story: "to take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory." To which I say, "Dude, that is so true!")

I was honestly kind of appalled by the pro-vengeance thing, but you can't say it wasn't interesting. I even sort of enjoyed the crazy cold water swimmer, and especially the photo of her in the water with, what were they, porpoises or something?

Here I just have one tiny obsvervation to offer. Twice in this issue, writers quote bloggers by saying in effect, "some blogger" or "a blogger at X." In both cases they're quoting someone extremely easy to identify. Why not put the person's name?

In a short talk Talk of the Town thing about Robin Morgan's "Goodbye to All That," they quote a passage critical of Morgan, and ascribe it to "one blogger." A quick google search shows it's Ann Friedman, writing at Feministing. Why not say so?

Then there's Nancy Franklin writing on The Hills. I love Nancy Franklin. I don't even watch TV but I always read her reviews. Franklin writes of a subset of the cast, "A writer at Jezebel.com called this branch of 'The Hills' the 'axis of vapid.'" A quick google search shows it's Moe Tkacik. It's not even like "A writer" is so much shorter than "Moe Tkacik."

Maybe I'm being oversensitive. If I am, it's not because I'm writing a blog. There's a difference between an anonymous chitter-chatter (which is what C and C is for now, for better or for worse), and something presented as one's own. Why not give a little credit, guys?

Consent To Bodily Harm: A Paradox?

2008-05-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Toronto Star had an interesting story yesterday about a court case. I've tried and tried to find it on their website but I can't so it's lucky I saved the dead-tree-format version I was reading over my dinner.

The headline is, "People Can't Invite Violent Sex Acts, Judge Rules." The case involves a couple who routinely engaged in what's described as "raunchy" sex, over a period of years. Some of that was sado-masochistic. They had a safe word.

The guy is accused of sexual assault for having choked her to the point of unconsciousness and then, well, maybe you're reading this over lunch or something, so let's just say, he's accused of having followed this up with further sexual acts while she was "out."

The accuser called the cops one month after it happened, and then later tried to recant, explaining that since it was a consensual interaction, there was nothing he did wrong. The accuser says she "routinely" consented to being choked.

OK, let's pass quickly over the whole report-it-one-month-later-then-deny-there-was-anything business. About that we can just say, something is f***ed up between these two people.

What's more interesting to me are the comments of the prosecutor and judge. The article says that the prosecutor (or as we call it here in Canada, the "Crown counsel"), argued "successfully" that "an individual cannot consent to bodily harm, such as being choked to the point of unconsciousness." The prosecutor called it "paradoxical" that one who was unconscious could be "in a position to enjoy heightened or intensified sexual gratification."

Later it says quotes the judge saying, "Even if she had consented previously - or on that night - she cannot legally consent to sexual activity that takes place when she is unconscious."

This makes it sound like according to the judge, the accuser could have consented to being choked. And maybe she could have consented to being choked to the point of unconsciousness. But she couldn't consent to anything that happened when she was unconscious.

So, does this mean that to engage in any sex act legally, each party must be in a position to give consent at the moment of sex? Then if two longtime partners want to get really drunk and have sex, or if a guy has sex with his wife in the middle of the night and she falls asleep in the middle, or if one person wants to get really stoned and have their partner have sex with them, all those things would be sexual assault.

It also makes it sound like according to the judge, there's nothing paradoxical going on, and it's not a question of bodily harm. It's just a question of the possibility of consent, and when and how it's required.

On the other hand, the judge also said, "the reasonable man would conclude that choking someone to the point of unconsciousness does interfere with that person's 'health or comfort,' and can, in some cases, endanger life."

I don't know what the law is, but if there's a law against making other people uncomfortable, we're all in big trouble.

Happiness and Memory

2008-04-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

If you weren't reading the Science Times carefully last week you might have missed the interview with Dan Gilbert. Gilbert wrote that book Stumbling On Happiness. It's a good book, and I wrote before about some of the questions I thought the his arguments raised.

One of the things Gilbert says in the interview is that a hard look at happiness shows that experiences are more likely to make you happy than things. Part of this, he explains, is because experiences tend to be shared with other people. This strikes me as very plausible.

Then he goes on to say that experiences also make us happy because they don't decay:

"People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No."

Here I get less sure I'm with him. In what sense don't experiences decay? Well, you have the memory of the experience, and even though that may change over time, if the experience was a happy one I'm willing to grant that it will continue to be a happy memory.

I'll grant that it's nice to have happy memories. But would it make you happier? My own sense is that I'm happiest when I'm thinking about the future, not the past. If things are good, and I'm expecting them to get a whole lot better, well, that makes me really happy. If things are good, and I'm expecting them to get a whole lot worse, well, that makes me unhappy.

Perhaps a more complicated thought here is that happy memories aren't just memories of events; they're part of your identity. Gilbert talks about going to visit his small granddaughter, and how happy that will make him. In addition to the obvious things like it's fun, and he loves her, and he'll look back on it fondly, he also gets the feeling of, I'm a doting grandfather.

This, too, though, has a lot to do with the present and future. If you're now estranged from your family, those experiences of the past are likely to present very mixed feelings. It's when they can become a part of your identity and your future that experiences like that matter so much.

Putting these thoughts together, it seems to me Gilbert is slightly overestimating the quality of the experience as a past item, and underemphasizing the importance of experiences as ongoing things. Experiences matter most when they're past, present, and future.

I've written before, here on C and C, about how hard it is to judge "correctly" how much you should care about your future self, as compared to your present self. Often, it seems to me, the present gets shafted: Put that money in savings! Don't have that second glass of wine! Please, think of your future selves!

And yeah, it's true that for experiences to be ongoing you have to have some of that worry. But for experiences to add up in the right sort of way, you can't have too much of it, either.

My Limitations Amaze Me

2008-04-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

My alarm went off this morning at 6. That is because I set it to go off at 6, even though it is a Sunday.

I had no actual intention of getting up for good at 6. There are some people that enjoy early rising; I am not one. I will sap every last minute of rolling around in bed until I am forced out by hunger or the demands of having a job. This is one of the reasons I don't have a pet.

But nevertheless, I set my alarm for 6 a.m. Because I had bought plants. I have, in my new apartment, a little semi-enclosed area that has some dirt in it, bordering the normal entrance-way/mini-patio. And for whatever reason, I was kind of semi-obsessed with the idea of planting things in that area.

Everybody reading this knows, or can imagine, that I am not what one would call a skilled gardener. Plants wither and die under my care. Even the hardiest of plants. Even when I take my job as plant owner seriously, which I mostly don't. But it is one of my areas of perennial optimism.

Which, actually, I consider a good thing. It may be a little sad for the plants, which die, and it's probably a waste of money and time, but it would also, I believe, be a little sad were I to abandon the dream of plant cultivation altogether, as fit only for a better, stronger breed of humanity than myself.

Anyway, hope sprang eternal and a week ago I went to the gardening center and bought some plants, and some soil, and a little trowel, and a little plant food. Then I got a visit from a friend who actually can keep plants alive and she suggested that I get, in addition, a pitchfork and some starter food.

So then followed a half-depressing/half-childish pleasure-inducing interval of drying to dig holes in the dry cracked soil around my patio. That moment where you realize the extent to which you don't know what you're doing. A kind of furtive burying of the plants in the ground.

Anyway, so my friend who knows about plants told me that for the first week I should be drenching these plants every morning as early as possible. Yesterday I failed to do so, so today I was going to wake up at 6, stagger out, water, return to bed.

And I didn't, because I just turned the alarm off and went back to sleep. Anyway, it just reminded me how strange it is to be alive, to have these things that you want to do, that aren't, on their face, so difficult to do, and yet be continually not doing them when you wanted to, or not doing them in the way you wanted to. How can that be true -- how can it have been too difficult for me to wake up at 6 a.m. to water my plants?

It was, though, and it's not as though I feel particularly bad about it either. Just surprised, mostly.

Sex And Anxiety: Essential Connection?

2008-04-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

When I learned years ago that anti-depressants sometimes fuck with people's sex drive, the first thing I wondered was, "Hm, is that because anxiety and sexual interest are somehow related?"

I've thought about this off and on but never really came to any conclusions. And I've never been on anti-depressants so I don't have first-hand experience. And I know some of the newer drugs are less of a problem for sexual interest, and more of a problem for orgasm, which at least complicates my question.

But it's always seemed kind of plausible to me that there's something here -- that maybe to be really into sex you have to feel kind of anxious. Or nervous. Or something.

Two items of interest:

1) The classic aphrodisiacs are stimulants, and being stimulated is a little like being anxious.

2) Going through withdrawal from heroin, from what I understand, makes a person want to have a lot of sex -- or at least a lot of orgasms -- since it's the only relief from the agony.

There's something about being totally relaxed that feels so, I don't know, self-sufficient. And if you feel self-sufficient, you don't need anything, right? And what's sexual desire without a feeling of need?

I realize "un-depressed" and "non-anxious" do not equal relaxed. Still, they do seem connected to self-sufficiency and non-need. So I don't know.

If there is an essential connection between these, it fits my general view that what is good in one way is often bad in another, and vice-versa. But maybe that view is idiosyncratic. I don't know.

Open Source Boob Project: One Girl's Opinion

2008-04-23T16:33:00.001-07:00

Maybe you heard about the Open Source Boob Project, where some geeks were at a sci fi convention and started imagining a better world, a world in which, if you wanted to touch a girl's breast, you could just ask, "can I touch your breast?" and she could say yes, or no, without any of the baggage that comes with reducing a person to her body parts or whatever.

Okay, I only know about it from this Jezebel post so it's not like I'm informed. But I can have an opinion on the story even if it's not accurately reported, right? I can have an opinion on the idea of an Open Source Boob Project?

Usually I'm all in favor of whatever: y'all are having fun, knock yourselves out. Sure. And basically that's my attitude here.

But still, something about the Open Source Boob Project gets a little on my nerves. What is it?

I think part of it is that the reason girls are touchy about having their breasts groped is precisely because of the attitude implicit in the Open Source Boob Project. Not that "I'd like to touch your breasts" is somehow bad in itself. But the idea that touching breasts is a kick for a guy in a way that has nothing to do with whether you're attracted, interested, thinking of pursuing further interaction.

I don't mean pursuing a relationship. No. I mean, pursuing further sexual interaction. The Project is supposed to be boob touching without even the context of "gee, maybe we'll, you know, um, later or something."

If touching breasts is such a kick to guys that it's like candy, regardless of whether there's any sexual anything going on, at all, in any way, well, honestly, all I can say is that that makes me kind of want to reserve my breasts for more special occasions.

So I guess I'll be one of the girls wearing the buttons that say, "No, you may not."

Actually there won't be any buttons, because those were part of the long-term plan that got nixed when people all over the internet were like, "Huh? What? Open Source Boob Project? What is wrong with you people?"

I'm sure it was fine between friends. But I think the trouble I've pointed out is one reason it's not going to work on a grand scale. Sorry. Even for a good-time girl -- perhaps even more so for a good-time girl -- boobs are kind of "closed source" items.

My Consumer Complaints

2008-04-22T13:19:00.001-07:00

It's like a million degrees here on the East Coast, and it's only April 22. I swear, like a week ago I had to put on my "somewhat heavy coat" because it was so cold and now I'm moving around the coffee shop trying to get out of the sun because I'm dying of the heat.

It's giving everyone a feeling of weather-vertigo -- you know, when it's the wrong temperature for the day's activities? It's a Tuesday in April, but it feels like a Saturday in August. Weird. Are we supposed to work? To go to the beach? Do we start drinking at 4 on the patios, or do we wait for cocktail hour proper? So many questions.

Since my brain is in a Saturday-in-August mood this is going to be a Saturday in August kind of post: uninformed, not very thoughtful, aimless.

The theme of this post is my consumer complaints. I have a few. You know the kind of thing: you're there, you've got the money to pay, you've got the time to shop, but no one is freakin' offering the thing you need.

The main thing I need is a stylish backpack. What committee of morons decided that if you're going to make a backpack it has to look like you're going hiking? Everywhere I go I say the same thing: "I'm looking for a backpack that is styled like a shoulder bag but is actually a backpack." And everywhere they tell me the same thing: there is no such thing.

I'm mystified by this. I want to carry a laptop. I'm a girl, so I'm not as strong as guys, and carrying a tote on the shoulder, or a bag in my hand, just wears me out. My back gets tired. I get all lopsided. My shoulder hurts.

I tried carrying an across-the-body messenger-style bag, but for certain reasons they didn't work with my DD-size boobs. The strap goes right between. It ruins my clothes. It looks ridiculous.

You'd think there'd be a million women out there with the same problems, looking for a nice but stylish backpack. Are there? I don't know. I know students carry those hulking massive camping style things, for their books, and I know certain women don't carry a laptop around at all. I guess there's also the "bag on wheels" thing but I'm certainly not going to the bag on wheels when there's a perfectly reasonable and comfortable alternative -- the backpack!

At one point I started fantasizing that I could buy a MacBook Air and it would weigh nothing and I could put it in a largish purse.

You know what, though? The MacBook Air has the same keyboard that the cheapo Mac has. It's plastic; it's ugly; it makes a little clicky sound when you type. I know, 'cause I asked the guys at the Apple Store to make sure. They said, "Yeah, we call that the 'chicklet' keyboard."

Argh! Guys, if I'm buying an expensive and super elegant slim computer, I want a nice keyboard. I do not want a bunch of chicklets!

And as long as I'm making a list, I'd also like some strappy non-wedge sandals, I'd like to able to sync my notes between my iPod touch and my computer, and I'd like everyone to stop charging such outrageous fees for Wi-Fi in public places. I mean, really, every local coffee shop is offering this for free with your espresso, and Starbucks wants 40 dollars per month? Sorry. Annoying.

In closing, for your reflection, here's what our consumer culture is good at: canny way to sell chocolate, guys!

Money and Happiness In The News

2008-04-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday in the Business section, the Times ran a story about data challenging the old hypothesis that "relative wealth" was more closely tied to happiness than "absolute wealth." The hypothesis was formed in the 1970's on the basis of research showing that while being wealthy did not make people happy, being wealthier than other people did.

This hypothesis is called the "Easterlin paradox" after its formulator, and says that happiness is tied to how wealthy you are relative to others, rather than in absolute terms. But what's paradoxical about it? It's highly intuitive to me. Feeling like one of the richest, the smartest, the coolest, is way more important to my happiness than being, in an absolute sense, rich smart and cool if everyone else is richer, smarter, cooler.

The new data are supposed to challenge the hypothesis, on grounds that people in richer countries are, well, happier.

OK, so I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass about this, but really, I don't see how this follows. I mean, if you're the one of the richest people in Haiti, you're still way poorer than people in other countries. So even if you're rich relative to Haitians, you're still poor relative to the world.

So your unhappiness is just as well explained by the "relative" wealth hypothesis as it is by the absolute wealth hypothesis.

Some cool looking Haitian money.

At least, it is if you're willing to accept the premise that people in poor countries are comparing themselves not only with their fellow-countrymen but also with people in other countries.

The premise seems reasonable. With globalization and the internet, I'm sure people all over the world are fairly informed about people all over the world, and how well they live. At least roughly speaking.

So, uh, I don't get it. Am I missing something?

How To Read Books Like An Idiot

2008-04-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around the bookstore the other day looking for something to read. I had just finished a book by Jay McInerney about September 11 and middle-aged love (The Good Life, it turns out, though I couldn't for the life of me remember the name.

I chose that one because I missed seeing the topic on the cover, and because I had just finished another book by him about models that I really liked (Model Behavior. I couldn't remember that one either. What's happening to me?). I didn't really enjoy The Good Life very much, though I'm not really sure why. The love part didn't really speak to me.

In the bookstore I saw something called "How to Read Literature Like a Professor." I thought, Wow. Wow. Seldom have I ever seen a how-to book for something I have less interest in doing. I don't want to learn to fly-fish; I don't want to day-trade; and I don't care to make high end Japanese food in my kitchen from scratch. But, you know, I can imagine wanting to do those things.

I can't really imaging preferring to read literature like a professor. Literature professors have their thing they're doing, about using literature to understand people, and life, and the world, and so on, but it seems to me that even if using literature this way is profitable and interesting, it's not really fun or pleasant.

Or, let me rephrase that: it's not fun or pleasant for me. Dorky as it may be, I just want to freakin' read and enjoy books. In the old, regular way.

It's getting harder and harder to do. Books are now part of the whole book-club industrial complex, and it's like the publishers are dying to make us all into little literary analyzers. Do. Not. Want.

It's annoying enough when the blurb engages in literary comparisons and "thought provoking" questions. It's worse, of course, when there are actual book-club questions at the end of a book.

This isn't quite the same but the very very worst trend in fiction publishing is acknowledgements at the end of the book. Can we please, please, please stop that? You're there at the end of the book, your mind is all engaged by this fictional world, in a kind of warm bath, when BAM-- the cold water of acknowledgements hits. "The author would like to thank the Zenith foundation . . . for . . . and also his girlfriend . . . and parents. . . and maybe his cat for being cute."

I'm not denying anyone's need to give thanks. The place for this is obviously at the front of the book, where all normal books have the acknowledgements. Before you start reading, who cares? It's at the end that it sucks. It really ruins the whole post-coital reading feeling for me. "OK! All done? We're done! Time to get back to real life! Hop to it sweetie!"

Please. No. Give me a few more minutes under the covers, dude. I'll get up eventually.

Maybe Oblivion, Maybe Not

2008-04-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

I've had a long long day, and I've had a couple of glasses of wine, so I don't want to take on anything complicated. But I was reading The Times over dinner, and I got all engrossed in the story about the Large Hadron Collider. And by the way, since I have a teenager's sense of humor, I can't forget that an earlier Times story on the web had a brief typo calling it the "Large Hardon Collider." How funny is that?

You may have heard that the Large Hadron Collider, when it gets going, has some small chance of creating certain effects that will end the universe. Some people are worried. So: how small is small? And what chances are tolerable?

The Times' Science guy Dennis Overbye tells us there is some disagreement about how to present the relevant information. Some physicists are wary; some think publishing objective facts is the only way to go.

About an earlier collider controversy, Overbye says,

"One report put the odds of a strangelet disaster at less than one in 50 million, less than a chance of winning some lottery jackpots."

So I'm reading that and I'm, like, what? "Less than a chance of winning some lottery jackpots"? This is meant to convey "small"? First of all, it's hardly reassuring to think of it this way, since we all know that somebody wins the lottery. So, um, some universe is going to get destroyed, but it may not be ours? Odds are small that it will be ours?

Then there's this:

"Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."

Um, "man-eating dragons"? Very reassuring guys! Maybe hiring a PR firm would not be out of line, after all.

Other People

2008-04-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

I was at the Post Office yesterday, trying to mail a simple box. Not even a heavy or big box -- just a properly wrapped, nicely addressed, medium-size, lightweight box.

When I got in line, there was one person ahead of me, and I thought, well, great, this is going to go like gangbusters.

The woman in front of me was a very well dressed and proper-looking somewhat older woman. Maybe, you know, 65 years old, and really turned out with expensive looking clothes and subtle make-up. Natural gray short hair.

She and I stood and waited. And we waited. And we waited. Turns out Saturday is, like, passport day at the Post Office, and there were two clerks tied up with passport customers with name changes, address questions, all kinds of shit.

The woman started to lose her cool. She could hardly stand it, that it was taking so long. She started fidgeting, sighing, looking around.

I found myself having a completely perverse reaction. Instead of sharing her impatience, I got annoyed at her. I found myself thinking things like, "Hey, chill. They're getting passports. No biggie. Where've you got to get to in such a hurry, Missy? What's your ego trip?"

Who knows why? Totally absurd.

Anyway, after ages and ages, she turned to me and said quietly, "It's just so hard to stay patient." And you know, for whatever reason that totally turned me from critic to friend. I was on her side. "I know!" I said, finally feeling the proper rush of shared feeling. "You'd think they'd have someone just doing regular mail stuff!"
It's funny that Captain C. was just posting about driving, because strangely enough, that's what this interaction got me thinking about. I don't drive, which means I take public transportation, which means I often have interactions like the one in which the woman and I spoke. And shared. And, you know, bonded over our plight. Bonding over your plight is a big part of taking public transportation, even if it's silent bonding.

And I was thinking that driving almost always encourages you in the opposite direction. To think of your fellow person as annoying, aggressive, in your way, to be a critic rather than a friend, is the natural driver stance. In fact, living in most parts of America, most of your interactions are like that. It's a wonder people are as warm-hearted as they are, given the constant reinforcement most of us get for regarding other people as just a big fat pain in the ass.

Anyway, the line grew huge behind us with passport people. Some of them were families; there was even a set of twins there to get passports photos. All swathed in pink. Cute.

Eventually a third clerk appeared and she waved her arms and said, "Anyone just need stamps?" With a gasp of relief my friend strode over and got her business taken care of.

Of course, once she was done I was practically gasping myself with anticipation. "Anyone here for stamps?" the third clerk called out again. I held up my box. I was now first in a long line. "I've just got this box!" I piped up.

"Oh, sorry, I can't do packages. I'm on restriction because of my shoulder."

Damn!!

Life Without A Car

2008-04-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

So I don't drive, which is one of those things that's under review, and, really, if I weren't so lazy I might decide to get a car, but I am lazy, and people have been really nice about giving me rides, and I like sitting on the bus in the morning so much and getting that extra five seconds of brain-deadness and listening to Neil Diamond tell me that the time have never been so good, and so I don't drive.

Now, obviously, there are a lot of trade-offs that you make in deciding not to drive. And some of them strike me as totally fair. It takes me longer to get places. I'm more dependent on other people. I have to put up with the other people on the bus. Sometimes I have to pay for a taxi. My life involves a certain amount of waiting around. I walk places that are a little farther to walk than is really comfortable. Sometimes I carry groceries back home. Etc.

Those are the imperfections of life and I am willing to put up with them graciously. But the other day I found myself faced with a different kind of situation. I had to go into a setting where I was not allowed to carry my cellphone with me. Also, they refused to hold my cellphone behind the desk. Sorry, they said, you have to keep it in your car.

But, I said, I don't have a car. What can I do? They said, well, then you can't take your cellphone with you.

And if there is one thing that the functioning non-driving life requires, it is the cellphone. The cellphone allows you to summon a taxi, to call for help, to extricate yourself from unpleasant situations. I got kind of pissed off, actually, thinking about it. It is not really an issue, or it is one, at least, that I can work around. But there's something about the fact that non-drivers don't just have to deal with the issue of carlessness on the transportation front, but that they have to deal with it on the lack of portable storage front, that drove me nuts, made me feel like a person without status.

I Am A Wuss, Part II

2008-04-10T21:56:00.001-07:00

This is only tangentially related to Noko Marie's post, and once again, I might have already written about this.

Sorry.

The point is, I am a physical coward in the most profound and simple of ways. Swimming in the ocean, I become convinced that I will drown. Trying to climb a hill, I imagine myself falling backwards. Escalators are terrifying. Anybody who tries to convince me that I am over-reacting is the enemy. Who wants me to die.

I don't know where this all came from.

See, but sometimes I forget. I think, god, it would be fun to ski down mountains or go surfing or I don't know what all.

Once upon a time I had a boyfriend with a motorcycle and I was 21 years old and I thought I was pretty goddamn cool. These days I am 30 and I have a colleague with a motorcycle and when I was offered a work-related ride on said motorcycle I was like, that would be awesome.

That's a total mis-depiction of the scenario, actually, which was really where he gave somebody else a ride on the motorcycle, and I was all like, that's so cool, I want to ride on your motorcycle, and he was like, okay, how about next week?

So next week becomes this week and all of a sudden he's explaining to me about leaning into curves and telling me what to do if I get too scared and I'm like, wait, why the hell am I doing this?

So I rode on the motorcycle and my leg shook the whole time and I thought I would die. And yet, simultaneously, it was awesome. And I got off and he was like, are you okay because your leg kept shaking?

And I didn't know how to explain that yes, I was a coward and I was scared out of my mind the whole time, really, really, really scared, but that nevertheless it was fun and I was glad I went.

By the way, I was wearing a helmet and everything.

Survivor: Death Edition

2008-04-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting story about aging and dying in The New Yorker this week. Michael Kinsley talks about boomer fascination with living the longest, and living the best, and about his own changed perceptions of aging and dying since he was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

Actually my favorite part of the story was the anecdote at the very beginning, which I felt captured something very common that hardly ever gets properly described. Kinsley is at the pool, and there's an older guy swimming, and the older guy is boasting about being 90, and then the older guy says, "I used to be a judge."

Kinsley describes how it slowly dawns on both of them that saying this has exactly the opposite effect of the effect it's intended to have. It's intended to say, "I'm a player." But having to explain it, obviously, you're not. It's intended to say, "I'm with it." But given the first blunder, obviously, well, you're not.

Kinsley describes it much better than I can. I found myself wondering what Kinsley said to the guy next. Because sometimes in that sort of situation you feel all sorry for the person and you try to change the tone of the interaction back into one in which they can make their statement mean what they meant it to mean. Other times in that sort of situation you feel the person's being a pain anyway, and you sort of quietly let the sorry effects sink in.

Although the article is thoughtful and interesting, it didn't really resonate with me much. I felt like I was reading about the mortality of some other kind of person, not much like me.

He talks about how, no matter what forms you're competitive in, the only competition that matters is how long you live. This, he says, can be inferred from the fact that most people wouldn't a few good years for any material good or wealth.

Hm, maybe. But people trade good years for all sort of other pleasures, like smoking and drinking too much and having unprotected sex and riding motorcycles and climbing mountains.

I'm a freak about death, but to be honest, once we know it's going to be finite and relatively short, I don't find myself obsessing about exactly how many years. I mean, what's the difference? When are you going to die? "Soon," is the right answer, no matter what your age or health status.

Kinsley didn't really seem to share this feeling of "Soon" until he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. There's a vivid and moving account of having the disease, and of the treatments, and of the outlook it gives you on life and death.

He says for the ill person, the future seems finite, something people who aren't sick only feel later. Every new thing feels like the last roll of the dice.

I believe it. But I feel like I've had that feeling forever. Really, since I can remember. I remember being 17 and thinking, well, you'll be young for a few more years anyway so there's a bit of time. I guess if you're not comparing yourself to others, just being human is like having a chronic disease, since we're all on a steady march toward death.

Maybe competition is the thing here. I'm not really very competitive. I just can't get really engaged by competition. What with life being so short and all, I always figure, what's the point? In the long run, as they say, we're all dead.

I Have A TV

2008-04-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is going to be one of those posts that I put up where I lack the energy to check if I've already written this all before. So if I have, I apologize.

I have a tv. I've had a tv, actually, for a week. But now I have cable too. I have both a tv and cable and I set up the remote control so that I can flip happily through my 64 channels.

For about five years I haven't had a tv, and I haven't had a tv of my own, as opposed to a roommate-owned and -controlled tv, for almost ten years. But now I have one and it nestles sweetly on my nightstand and on Friday night I will be watching the Lakers play the Hornets on KCal if it's not showing on one of the national channels.

So there was one year when I had a tv of my own, and it heavily influenced my decision not to get a tv for a long time after that because I watched tv all the goddamn time. I realized that Magnum P.I. was really a quality show and that Northern Exposure was just as quirkily charming as I had been told back in 1992 or whatever. (I didn't have a tv during my formative years, which is probably why somebody described me as funky today.)

Anyway, I would lie there in this small town in Colorado and I wouldn't go walk along the Purgatory River and I wouldn't hike up into the hills and all that; I would lie on my stomach in my living room and watch Angela Lansbury solve the crime once again. Which seemed, later, like a waste of time. Time was passing and I was getting older and golden opportunity was fucking fleeting and I shouldn't have been watching tv.

So I ditched the tv.

But now it's back. It's back because I guess I'm older and I think I'll miss opportunities one way or another and there are going to be lots and lots of times when I will lack that critical ability to live life to the fullest, you know? But I will still be bored and want to be entertained. And now I have a machine that can make that happen.

Buying a tv is accepting the limitations of human life.

I Am A Wuss

2008-04-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

Just the other day I was in the coffee shop and I went to use the bathroom and the bigger stall had the door open but the toilet there was all fucked up and the smaller stall had the door closed so without thinking about it I adjusted my line of sight so I could see, through the slivery crack on the side of the door, whether someone was in the stall.

"There's someone in here," she yelled.

"Oh, sorry," I said.

"You should be!" she practically spat back. Whoa. OK, maybe it's creepy to be checking the slivery crack. And the crack in that particular bathroom *is* unusually large for the side of a stall door. I didn't mean anything; I just wasn't thinking.

"Sorry," I repeated in a tone I hoped conveyed both "I am sorry" and "you are totally overreacting." "I was just checking if there was anyone there." I stood there; eventually she came out and we looked away from one another and I went into the stall and that was over.

So here's the confession: it made me cry. Yes, I peed, and then I washed my hands, and then I left the coffeeshop -- I hadn't even had my coffee! And I walked around the block with my suglasses on and I cried and cried.

OK. Maybe I was overtired to start with, on edge. I have been, a little. But it's also true that I am not used to being spoken to in anger. Really not used to it. And it fucking freaked me. I was so mad and ashamed at the same time, and also just felt taken down a peg in a way that felt horrible.

I remember thinking, Oh, yeah, no wonder they had duels. That way the emotions could get built up, channeled, and then transformed into something else -- like the feeling of mourning or cheating death or whatever.

And then I was thinking, "I am a wuss." Which I always have been. I mean I'm tough as nails when it comes to being persistent and doing what I want to do and whatever but I'm 100 percent wuss when someone is mean to me.

But I also got to thinking that there's more of this than there used to be, and that the young people are more. . . I don't want to say "used to it," because I think they take it hard, too, in the end. . . but more, you know, expecting it.

I guess if you have a Facebook page or a MySpace page or you put your stuff up online you expect to get a certain kind of really nasty critical response. Certainly all the forums I encounter online with anonymous comments there's a ton of this shit unless it is moderated out.

So maybe that makes it seem more normal. Maybe, too, they are hardened a little by all the hyper-competition that every thing has become. I don't know. I just know that young people are slightly making me nervous these days. They have the aggression skills, and they're not afraid to use them.

I, on the other hand, am a wuss.

But, you know, older people have always been frightened by the young. So maybe the moral of this story is just the same as that of my previous post on being a dinosaur: You, Noko Marie, are getting old.

Keeping Priorities Straight

2008-04-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

In the Science Times today there was a discussion of Randy Pausch's last lecture. Dr. Pausch was diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer, and there is a 95 percent chance he'll die within the next few months.

The story was all about how he was "keeping his priorities straight," by recording this last lecture for his three children, using it to give them advice, and turning down movie and documentary offers to spend more time with the kids.

Maybe only a relentless cynic could think to be critical of a dying man. But there was one paragraph in the Times story that weirded me out:

"Last fall, after doctors told him that he would probably have no more than six months of good health, Dr. Pausch stepped down from his academic duties and relocated to be closer to his family. But he decided to give one last lecture to a roomful of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon."

He had to quit his job to be closer to his family? I checked the story; he's not divorced or anything. He and his wife are married. And they have three small children. And he has a good sort of academic job; it's not like the family was going to go without.

I know how things get with work and family and all. But really, it's weird to take a guy whose career took on such importance that he had to live apart from his wife and three kids and say, well, here's a guy keeping his priorities straight.

At most you could say that here's a guy who got his priorities straight. No? Am I wrong?

One reason being a woman and a feminist is so exhausting is you can't help but read these things as if they were the other way around, and you can't help but compare. And I didn't even want to in this case. But really, if a woman took a job that required her to live apart from her three small children, and then was diagnosed with a fatal disease, and then moved back to be close to them, there is no way in hell the theme of the story would be "keeping priorities straight." The theme of that story would be something like, "I learned what really mattered. And it was too late!"

Also poignant. But very different.

Obesity: One Question We Can Answer?

2008-04-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

There was an infuriating piece on the Huffington Post this morning by John Ridley about a proposal to make it illegal to discriminate against overweight people. I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to be providing any page-views. Also because I'm not doing any fancy interpretive work here.

The part that pissed me off was just this:

"For the vast majority of those who are obese -- those with a Body Mass Index over 30 -- their size is their choice. They choose to take in more calories than they burn."

Good. Lord. There seems to be this idea out there that lots of people are overweight because they choose to be. But that idea is insane. Just to mention one thing: in interviews people often say they would prefer various disabilities over being overweight. Duh.

There are obviously lots of factors involved in weight. But look, there is one question it should be absolutely straightforward to answer: do some people get fatter than others while eating the same amounts of food?

Because I bet the answer is yes. And the methodology would be totally straightforward: get some people to commit to a few months under lock and key, feed them, and weigh them. I'm sure you could find volunteers if you paid them enough. It could be like a vacation. Doesn't some rich person want to fund something like this?

I am so tired of people saying, "It's basic physics! Calories in, calories out!" This is obviously nuts, as anyone knows who has friends with serious intestinal problems. If you're sick, you can eat a lot and still lose weight, because you're not absorbing the calories. So obviously it's not a simple equivalence. And it's not freakin' physics! Geez.

On Becoming A Dinosaur

2008-04-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

When you're young it's always hard to picture how older people get so, you know, out of the loop. What makes them seem so dated? I mean, it's not like the don't have access to all the same things.

For a middle-aged person I'm reasonably conversant with the new. But yesterday's Times story about blogging made me feel about a million years old.

The story, which you probably saw, discussed the manic life of bloggers. I knew that lots of bloggers who live off of blogging don't make that much money, and I knew that they often get paid by page views (which has its own weird puzzles).

What I didn't know is that blogging was so much about being first. The story said that if you're making blogging your profession, it's crucial to get the news first. Even being milliseconds behind the next guy and you lose.

I don't get this -- I mean, I don't even get how this works in practice. I mean, suppose you're a reader. You read some blogs. You check in, find something mentioned. How would you know whether it was being mentioned seconds earlier on some other blog?

And if the news is something you want to read about, don't you want to know what your favorite blogger thought about it, regardless of whether it was a few hours later?

As a reader, I can't even picture what is happening. You mean readers are checking blogs to see who has the news first and then only reading those blogs? What would be the point of that? I don't even see why someone would do that.

(I also wasn't sure why all the bloggers are at home. Wouldn't you take your laptop to the cafe and blog from there? How depressing to be sitting at home all day.)

Clearly I am being left behind by some new mode of existence. The Times reports that the result of all this is that bloggers never sleep, are poor, and have terrible health problems. At least I have the consolation of knowing that the new mode sucks.

I Do Not Live At The Center Of The World

2008-04-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

A fact which I guess is even more true now that I live in Bakersfield rather than L.A.

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the fact that when one looks up basketball schedules on the L.A. Times website (that would be the Los Angeles paper, if you're curious), they give you the game times in Eastern Time.

This is probably actually because the L.A. Times just puts in some schedule-generated somewhere else, and Eastern Time is the national default for tv schedules, and so that's the way it is. Still, there's something eerie about watching a Los Angeles based paper print the times of its own home team according to the time of some other locale entirely.

It reminds me of the sense I had, growing up, that Los Angeles was not really a part of the national consciousness. Which may seem ridiculous, given the entertainment industry and all, but that wasn't the L.A. I lived. A lot of the people I went to high school with, I guess, had parents who made their livings off such mysterious things as residuals but up until that point I didn't really know anybody in L.A. who was involved in all that.

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems that I would try to make that claim, that L.A. wasn't part of the national consciousness. We had the Lakers and City of Quartz and the riots and Joan Didion brooding about fires and flooding and water rights. We had L.A. Gear and, for a while, both the Raiders and the Rams, and the big one was coming one of these days.

So maybe my sense of the dominance of the East Coast was more a matter of the knee-jerk sense that a place you love is, however much consideration it actually gets, under-appreciated, the impulse that drives people to write passionate letters in defense of Kobe Bryant.

But I will tell you this. When I lived in Los Angeles, not so very long ago, half the people I knew had grown up there, gone away, returned. And yet, talking to strangers who weren't from there, when I said I was they would say, "Oh, that's so unusual," suffering from the widespread rumor that Los Angeles is a city of dreamers, of kids from Nebraska looking to make it big.

Whereas, I guess what I'm saying is that in some ways Los Angeles is just a city, a big city, a city that deserves to have its hometown paper print the tv schedules in accordance with the time zone in which it actually exists.

Poverty And The New You

2008-04-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

Back in the fall, in simpler times, I wrote about Roy Baumeister and his theory of ego depletion. I found it hilarious, and intuitive, the idea that the self was a "limited resource" that could be used up.

If you've got the right sort of mind, thinking about the self this way is an extremely handy way to justify doing lots of things you want to do. I frequently tell myself: sure, have another glass of wine; have a cookie; buy those new linen pants. After all, you're using up your ego on more important things. So knock yourself out.

In a way it seems like a rationalization. But in a way I am convinced this is sound reasoning. I do wear myself out using up my self-control, and I would rather use it up getting my work done and going to the gym than being sober, skinny, and rich. Not that I don't want to be sober, skinny, and rich, mind you. OK, not that I don't want to be skinny and rich. You know what I'm saying.

Yesterday some other neuroscientists wrote in the Times that the "belt-tightening" we're likely to experience in the economic downturn will lead to literal belt-loosening: that is, having to restrict our consumer spending, while painful in the short run, may lead us to actually have more will power in the future.

They're using Baumeister's research, and the point seems to be that while egos get depleted in the short run, you can expand your reservoir of self-control by practicing restraint. Eventually your will power will increase.

I made a joke about this in my previous post: how can you get started practicing self--control if you have no self-control? But here there's a different, and more troubling, theoretical problem. Because belt-tightening is not, in this case, an exercise in restraint at all. It's an exercise in restriction.

Look, we're already making less than we need to spend. That's not going to be "new" in a recession. What's going to be new is that there'll be actual bankruptcy, and actual credit card cancellations, and actual inability to overspend.

If you don't buy fancy shoes because you can but you decide not to, that's self-restraint. If you don't buy fancy shoes because you literally cannot, that's not self-restraint, it's just, you know, I can't buy those shoes.

Since the any ecomomic downturn is likely to involve the latter -- as in, "No, you failed to make your mortgage payment; you can't live here" -- there won't be any increase in practicing restraint.

There'll just be a lot of pissed off consumers. And what's one of the things that uses up your ego and will-power most quickly? Not acting on feelings of aggresssion. So I'm not predicting a return to the savings-account-bankbook-eat-your-brocolli style of living. Not soon, anyway.

Bracketology

2008-03-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

There was a big thing a few years back about creating NCAA type brackets of everything. Which seems dumb and not even that funny.

I may just be bitter because once again my bracket is totally fucked. I have Kansas winning it all, which is obviously a terrible idea, because the history of Kansas is not so swell, plus they just barely escaped Davidson, but none of that even matters because I have Kansas beating Duke in the final game.

My brackets always wind up totally screwed up. Some of it's because certain schools like Cincinnati (which I did not know I did not know how to spell until just this past moment) and Indiana and Oral Roberts and Cal in those freakish years it makes the tourney (as I like to call it) suck me in. And then, and this is the second thing, the bracket takes on a life of its own. You've picked, let's say, Oral Roberts to beat Pittsburgh, and Cornell to beat Stanford (by the way, only one of those examples is from real life) and all of a sudden you find yourself staring down a situation where Xavier is your obvious choice for national champion, although this year I really should have picked Xavier to go all the way -- I would be better off right now.

My brackets represent to me, in their history of tragedy, my failed quest for sports legitimacy. There are currents in the air of sports that I just don't feel. I didn't think Kobe Bryant would be that good. I didn't think there was anyway the Dwayne Wade-led Heat would win the NBA championship that year. And my brackets always suck.

But I would just like to say, that for all the griping about the BCS computers and their arbitrary and random selection process, that it's not like brackets always lead to such great decision making either. Head to head competition, not always as sensible as it looks.

Women Eating Dirt. WTF?

2008-03-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned before, I used to read The Superficial. It's a celebrity site that walks that familiar line between irony and actual childish meanness: under the guise of ironically making fun of the way we gossip about celebrities, especially women and their bodies, we get to gossip about celebrities, especially women and their bodies.

I used to find it sort of palatable because 1) it was sometimes sort of funny and 2) the authors jokes were often self-deprecating, including, e. g. jokes about the smallness of their penises and so on.

But then one day there was a picture of some older woman, I can't remember who, looking kind of reasonable and normal, and the entry was all about how disgusting and revolting she looked and I had just had enough and I decided to stop reading.

Occasionally when I'm super bored and I feel I've been super good, I allow myself a peek. This morning, a Sunday, I spent the whole morning working on something difficult, and I wanted a bit of mental candy, and I typed in the URL.

The first thing up was an old picture of George Clooney's girlfriend with her ass up in the air and her face down on a dirty magazine, sort of licking at it or something, posing for some sexy photo for some reason, with predictable commentary about her being not the kind of girl you'd bring home to mother and being a slut and all that.

Ugh. I'm pretty freewheeling about sex and sexiness for women, and I was young during the 80's when women being sexual was no big deal. I'd have thought nothing of it if a friend of mine had posed for sexy pictures.

I'm amazed, though, at how much "sexy" has been made over into slutty. How did this happen?

Actually there are two things. First, so much of what is considered "sexy" for women now is implicitly or explicitly demeaning to them. Like what's-her-name having her face in the dirt. Yuck. And second, the having of sex of normal sex now is considered "slutty" and trashy.

I honestly don't get where this is coming from. Is it just hatred of women?

I mean, for a long time, Playboy was the kind of standard representative of what it was to represent women as sexy. And if you look at Playboy, the women are not eating dirt. I mean, you can argue 'til the cows come home about whether the very photography itself demeans women, but whatever you think about this, there's still a huge difference between a woman posed elegantly, and intelligently, and a woman eating dirt. And the Playboy girls usually look pretty elegant and intelligent, in my opinion.

Playboy even goes out of its way to emphasize the women's real life accomplishments. Even if this is made-up, it's clear their point of view is that the woman is sexier if she's a real person, worthy of respect. In fact, this is so especially if it's made-up.

Also, Playboy always commands its readers to respect women's sexuality. In their advice columns and so on they always steer readers away from a double-standard: women who like sex, they say, should be respected, and never regarded as "slutty" or bad.

I'm not defending Playboy, here, though I think a good defense of Playboy on these grounds is plausible and could be given. I'm just drawing a contrast between this long-time standard and the new misogyny.

What is up with that? Have men always wanted to watch women eat dirt, and they only used to read Playboy 'cause they couldn't get away with the dirt business? Or is this all something new? WTF?

Anyway, it's horrible. Guess I'll have to find my mental candy somewhere else.

Autonomy And Lust

2008-03-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

In my proto-post on Viagra I promised reflection on the whole Viagra-for-women controversy.

What controversy, you ask? Well, obviously Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies are dying to make and market a female equivalent to Viagra.

Turns out that's more complicated than they thought, because women's physiology, and women's sexuality, is more complicated than men's.

And some women are arguing that not only is a female desire pill elusive, it's also a step down a wrong and dangerous road: it improperly treats women's lack of desire as medical "problem" or disease, while in fact it is both natural and a proper response to certain life conditions, like age.

Leonore Tiefer, a psychiatry prof at NYU, has become a kind of spokesperson for this view, and has started The New View campaign to educate women and industry about the idea that "female sexual dysfunction" may not be dysfunction at all.

For Viagra's 10th anniversary, US News and World Report interviewed Tiefer; you can read it online here. While I agree that there are certain dangers associated with any drug that alters the way a person feels, it seems to me the push to not create such drugs at all is a dramatic overreaction to these dangers.

The most obvious point here is that some women do experience loss of desire in a way that does seem "dysfunctional" and in a way that makes them unhappy. Women who've had various diseases, women on anti-depressants and other drugs, women who have unusual hormonal distributions may experience loss of sexual desire as a physiological effect in a relatively simple sense. It's hard to see why they should be prevented from treatment they want.

Others have made this point effectively. But I want to defend the more radical point of view that desire-enhancing drugs are appropriate for pretty much any woman who wants them.

Sometimes the worry is that "medicalizing" women's desire is a way of manipulating and controlling women from the outside. In a sense this may be true -- I return to it below. But there is one important sense in which it isn't true.

Sometimes philosophers who work on identity distinguish between those desires we identify with and those desires we feel are imposed upon us "from the outside." For instance, if I think of myself as someone who is kind and gentle, and I have an urge to punch you in the face after I lose at checkers, I may feel the violence as alien to my sense of self, even if it comes literally from inside me.

It's hard to distinguish these conceptually, or to find a good criterion. But one popular attempt to do so tells us that the desires that are "ours" are the ones we want to have: if I want to want to be kind, that desire is my own; since I would much rather not want to punch you, that desire is not. (see, e. g., the work of Harry Frankfurt).

Theorists endorsing this line of thought sometimes say that the ability to have the desires you want to have makes you more free, more autonomous, more yourself. I If I punch you after checkers I am less free, less autonomous, less myself, because I am controlled by a force that is not me: my rage.

On this criterion, anyway, desire-enhancing drugs would make the person who takes them more free, more autonomous, and more herself -- assuming her longing to feel desire is genuine -- since she would then have the desires she wants to have. So such drugs would not at all be manipulative.

It is true that for this to be the case, a woman's preference must be genuine. And perhaps one may say that once there are drugs for female desire, the social pressures to take them, or the pressure from men to take them, would make such preferences social, and not autonomous -- not belonging to the woman herself.

I admit such dangers are real. But for these considerations to trump others, it seems to me we have to assume that they are overwhelming: that women's preferences in this area could seldom be genuine, could seldom be their own, will always be the result of pressure. Women, on this view, must be incapable of choosing for themselves.

It seems to me the dangers of such an assumption are worse than the dangers of medicalizing female desire. So, on this autonomy thing, I'm coming down on the side of the pharmaceutical companies: you want to make female Viagra, and market it to the world, and become rich? Fine. Knock yourselves out.

I will say that if Viagra continues to be covered by insurance and the female drugs are not I will be pissed off on principle!

The Way I Look And How I Feel About Feminism

2008-03-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

I was in a car, at a stoplight, in the evening, and the person driving, who I like a lot, wanted to know if I would answer a personal question and I said okay, and so I got asked what the deal was with my general failure to wear makeup. Which was kind of a funny thing to get asked. I don't know; we talked about it some. But it led me to contemplate the relationship between the way I actually dress and look and my feminist beliefs.

(By the way, this post started life as a comment on this recent post by Noko Marie, but got a little unwieldy for a comment.)

Because I think we can all agree that I look a lot like what you would imagine if you were to draw up in your mind kind of a stereotypical feminist image. I don't want to overstate the case, but I'm kind of hairy, and my hair is pretty short, and I don't wear makeup, and I wear pants mostly, and I'm slightly unkempt, and I could go on and mention the goddamn nose piercing, but I don't really think there's any point to it.

Nothing about the way I dress is mandated by my feminist beliefs. My feminist beliefs do not bar me from makeup or hair removal or the sporting of short skirts or high heels or panty hose or whatever your own secret personal version of archetypal femininity is. In fact, my feminist beliefs encourage the indulgence in and enjoyment of such things.

There's the complicated issue, discussed previously on this blog, of the intersection of personal indulgence and cultural coercion, but we'll leave that for another day.

So if somebody asks me why I don't wear makeup, in some ways the most honest answer is that it's a combination of laziness and slobbiness and intimidation and the disinclination to put anything on my face that I might find had shifted over several hours.

But at the same time, I feel disingenuous when I just say things like, "I'm too lazy to wear makeup," when I make it clear that my lack of makeup isn't a referendum on other people's makeup. Because I feel strongly that makeup shouldn't be a norm or a demand. Because I feel like it's important that I be able to look the way I mostly do without it being a political stance. Because my decision not to wear makeup isn't a statement, but my decision not to care about the fact that other people notice that I'm not wearing makeup is, I guess, one.

Viagra's 10th Birthday: A Proto-Post

2008-03-28T12:49:00.001-07:00

OK, I was trying to write a post this afternoon about the 10th anniversary of Viagra and the whole "Viagra-for-women" controversy and how everyone is saying that popping a pill is no substitute for intimacy or choosing the right partner and yada yada yada and I was going to try to explain why I'm all for Pfizer in this case but time ran out on me so it's going to have to wait 'til later.

But I will say this now: halfway through writing I googled "viagra image" for a cute snapshot of some Viagra pills, and I came across this article in an online science magazine in which some Pfizer guy writes about "How I discovered Viagra." (I also came across the image above. Cute pill pic!)

And the pull-out quotation from the article is this: "I remember thinking that, even if it did work, who would want to take a drug on a Wednesday to get an erection on a Saturday?"

The answer, of course, is "everyone." I mean, I know the time lag has gotten shorter but wasn't the previous treatment like a needle in the penis or some shit like that? Obviously people would have put up with even a radically inferior product. Is it just 20-20 hindsight that makes this so obvious?

It makes me happy that the discovery of Viagra is associated with goofiness and accidents. Like after the discovery supposedly the inventor took it, before his conference presentation or whatever, and took down his pants, and walked around and showed his hard-on to everyone. "Look! It works! Check it out, Beavis!"

That. Is. Awesome. Can we have more crazy shit like this in academia? Please? I'm going out of my mind with boredom!

Angry Women

2008-03-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran a piece they called "Post-Feminism and Other Fairy Tales." Reading it I had one of those moments you have where you're like, "Wait. What?" "Post-feminism"? Us?

Oh, right. Feminism, that's so 80's.

According to The Times, we thought we were in a "post-feminist" era, when "the big battles were over" and the "younger generation" was "less hung up" on stuff. But, well, I guess we were wrong, or something.

OK. I know a lot of young women don't consider themselves feminists, and indeed, regard many of the issues associated with feminism as somehow "over" or boring. But I associate that idea with, like, 20-somethings. Are 20-somethings now the target audience of Times readers? What is up with this?

I'm thinking there are two things going on here:

1) Some female readers of The Times believe that to be a feminist one need not give up on sex, fashion, and femininity. That doesn't seem to me really a post-feminist idea, though I guess you could call it that if you want people to read and link to your story.

2) Some male readers of The Times are excited by, or eager for, more "post-feminism" than there really is out there.

Well, you know, the tone of the story is like, "oops!" turns out women are, you know, maybe a little angry. You didn't know that, but it's true! Angry!

I got thinking about this today because two things made me angry.

First, Dan Savage made fun of the bloggers at Jezebel because they said Abby (of dear Abby) gave the wrong advice to a guy who claimed his brother had sex with his wife while she thought it was him. Abby said something like, "Uh, are you sure you trust her story, when she says that she didn't know"? Jezebel said something like, "Uh, gee, when your wife says someone had sex with her under suspicious circumstances, you gotta believe her, dude!" Which seemed to me pretty obviously correct.

Dan Savage said they overreacted because the letter was fake; a guy's typical fantasy.

This pissed me off. Even if the letter is fake, if you're going to answer it, don't you have to answer it with actual advice? And if the letter represents a male fantasy, isn't it worth reminding a guy that if something like this happens on his watch, he'd better OK it with the wife first, rather than later?

Savage seemed partly upset that Jezebel called the situation rape. But yeah, actually, if a man comes into a sleeping woman's room and has sex with her without her say-so, this is rape. That's not any kind of semantic puzzle or grey area. How could this not be the main thing happening in that story?

The second thing that pissed me off today was when this owner of a vegan strip-tease club was quoted in the Times as saying that he doesn't worry too much about his "feminazi" critics. Seems those critics have posted on the internet complaining, and "one of them came in once" to the club and acted crabby.

OK, listen. You can't have sex with women without their consent; if you do it's rape. And you can't call someone a "feminazi" for peaceful criticism of your sex business. Actually, let me qualify: you can't call someone a "feminazi" for any reason, whatesoever! period!

These rules aren't complicated! Sheesh! No wonder women are so pissed off.

Dreams, The Retelling Of

2008-03-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

So I'm sick, sort of. I'm more post-sick, right now, in the same way some people describe themselves as post-feminist. That means I have a lot of very colorful phlegm with trace amounts of blood mixed in, and that I sleep poorly, which I've been doing anyway because I have this new job and it's taking a lot of psychic energy that works itself out into dreams of mastering the computer system over and over and over again.

By the way I'm typing this post on a computer in a hotel lobby, which means that it will be short and distracted.

Anyway, being sick and being under psychic stress meant that last night I had some very gripping narrative-oriented dreams and that I wasn't sleeping so soundly that I couldn't remember them.

When I was in my 10th grade English class, one of the exercises the teacher wanted us to do was to keep a dream journal. This is only one of a number of points where I was told to pay attention to my dreams, to the details of them, that they had all this information to offer. The idea, in that class, was that eventually we would write poetry based on those dreams. Or, you know, one day make short films about them. Who the hell knows.

Maybe that's a growing up in L.A. thing. Either way, I feel like you're told to pay attention to what's going on in your dreams. There is, you're told, meaning there. But the other thing you learn as you grow up is that other people will find being told your dreams intensely boring. Unless, of course, they're in the dream, and then you should really only tell them about it if there's something flattering to their presence in your dream -- you should probably avoid it if in the dream they were eating donuts or something similarly mundane.

People are waiting for these computers, and I don't really have much more to say about it, except that I find those two strands of focus on dreams a little funny and strange.

Good Books Are Good

2008-03-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

I don't have any firm tastes when it comes to genres of novels. Any kind of book, it seems to me, can be a good book.

So when I read Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker saying that the "Gossip Girl" books were good books, I immediately made plans to go out and buy one. OK, books for ninth-graders about high school seniors aren't usually my thing, but hey, any book can be a good book.

I was especially taken by Malcolm's suggestion that the books were simultaneously engaging with, and poking fun at, the narcissism and self-involvement of adolesence. I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for teenagers and teenager-dom. Their over-the-top obsessions strike me as more interesting and admirable than they're usually made out to be. At the same time, those obsessions often creep into the realm of ridiculous. So I was intrigued by the double-sidedness.

I read the first book. It's all about kids who go to some fancy school for rich kids in Manhattan; there's a sort of "perfect" girl, a "striver" girl, some cute boys, an "artsy" outsider girl, and various satellite people. The main action is in the friendship between the perfect girl and the striver girl.

That aspect of the book is good.

(The cover. Wouldn't a drawing or something have been better?)

Maybe I'm a prude, but other things about the books creeped me out -- I couldn't stop imagining what it would be like to read these books as an actual ninth-grader.

There's very little actual sex. There is, of course, lots of discussion about sex, and lots of almost-sex. But that didn't isn't what creeped me out.

So what was it? Here are three things. One: various scenes of the striver girl stuffing her face and vomiting it all up right after. The mood of these sessions is very much "oh yes, business as usual." Indeed, one of the perfect girl and the striver girl's most relaxed moments together come while the striver girl is throwing up. It's familiar territory for them.

Two: the perfect girl comes back from boarding school and everyone's been gossiping about why she had to leave. In what seems to me a very realistic portrayal, the kids decide that she's had so much sex with so many guys in school that she contracted some super-STD and had to be kicked out. As a former reader of The Superficial, I can attest that the having of super STDs is a huge trope for dissing girls these days.

Three: one the gang is a rich boy who wants to fuck everything that moves, and who pushes a tipsy ninth-grader into a bathroom stall and takes off her clothes, and it's only because her hero brother responds to her panicked cell phone call and arrives in time that she is rescued.

OK. I know that eating disorders, misogyny, and date-rape are huge elements of the adolescent experience in 2008. And I know that reading about stuff is a way of understanding it. Sure. And there's always, always the problem of whether evil is there for titillation or there because evil is real.

Still. There's something weird about it here. Sure, the girls' lives are being examined, and sure, the girls all suffer from problems. But the overall effect is of glamour. You know how some problems people have can seem very real and very painful but still kind of cooler and more interesting than life's ordinary problems? That's what it's like.

I mean, the overall effect for me was glamour, and I'm a middle-aged professor. How could a ninth-grader experience them as anything but? So overall it seems to me any critical message is drowned out by the more obvious, "This, this is what the good life is." That's what creeped me out. Especially, I gotta say, the throwing up. What the fuck?

After Gossip Girl I read this book called The Death of Vishnu which takes place in India and is written by a guy who grew up in India and now lives in the US. It was almost unclassifiable to me: a quiet story about the families who live in an apartment building, but also a meditation on death and the nature of rationality and spirituality, but also a kind of cinematic soap opera shot through with Bollywood references. Unclassifiable. Just very good.

INXS

2008-03-17T18:14:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of things that Noko Marie's most recent post makes me want to say, things about the urge toward some kind of condensation of all your past experiences into one compact burst of pure montage-style-striving-for-perfection, otherwise known as nostalgia. But I'm too punch-drunk and dazed to say those things now.

So let me raise this instead: why do I find excess, in and of itself, fun? Because I do. That kind of drastic listing to one side, rather than the other -- I like that. To the extent that there are certain bad habits I never toyed with, it mostly has to do with knowledge of my own propensity for drastic measures.

Example. When I get sick, here, to the extent I can, is what I do/did: I cancel any and all appointments and obligations. I drink a gallon of Gatorade. And I sleep for 24 hours straight. I was 23 years old before it even dawned on me that other people dealt with sickness differently. Other people, I gradually realized, took things slower. They did not cancel everything. They drank more fluids, but they didn't go all nuts. They ate normal meals.

I experimented with this, and realized that yes, I could have a cold, and still live a mostly normal life. It was a stunning realization. And, also, being sick became a lot less fun. Who wants to be sick if it's just like normal life only feeling crummier? Whereas being sick in that super-dramatic "I'm dying of consumption kind of way" struck me as, in some way, enjoyable.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of all that.

I'm Anti-Nostalgia

2008-03-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

I'm am. I'm anti-nostalgia.

I'm not against old things, and I'm not against the past, though I am probably less interested in the past than most people. I'm not anti- the nostalgias of others, really. What I'm against is nostalgia in myself.

I say, "anti-" rather than just "I don't like. . . " because my feelings are more complicated than just not liking, and it's my active stance that is, well, anti-nostalgia. I don't want to feel nostalgic; I don't want to engage in activities that indulge desires for nostalgia, and I don't want to encourage in myself any nostalgic participation in art, music, books, and so on.

I'm not totally clear why I have this stance. Part of it has to do with my feeling that nostalgia for me is like a bad drug: it's kind of fun and interesting while it's going on, but when I wake up and look out the window I feel the awful crash of the mood-that-is-no-mood and the feeling of wasted time. I hate that.

Then part of it is also my engagement with the item of nostalgia becomes an engagement with myself, rather than with something else, and this depresses me.

Also, when it comes to culture and its producers, I feel an obligation to support the people around me. I mean, there are people writing books, making music, etc etc etc; if I spend my music dollars on the Rolling Stones what will happen to all that?

Obviously this last couldn't be the whole story on its own, because like I said, I'm not against the past. Many of my favorite things are old things: the novels of Trollope, the music of Mozart and T. Rex, old movies.

The important thing is these are all things I currently engage with for what they are. I don't locate them in any special time and place of my own to which they recall me. So my love of them has nothing to do with nostalgia, and everything to do with just liking.

Other things I try to avoid. When I was young I was obsessed with The Velvet Underground, and the other day in the cafe I go to they had on an album. . . some mix someone had downloaded, as it turned out. The songs were so, so good, and they didn't sound dated at all, they just sounded, you know, awesome.

I briefly considered going out and buying a Velvet Underground CD.

But I gave that plan up. Because I have a rule: no old things that evoke your own past. Old things are OK if they're new to you, or if they transcend the past, but those songs are forever super-glued in my mind to a certain time and place. A certain me. No, the rule says, no, you can't indulge that.

This example makes me remember another reason I'm anti-nostalgia, which is fear at being left behind. The world is moving on; if you're at home listening to your old Velvet Underground CDs you're not going to have anyone to talk to, and you're going to be unhappy and lonely every time there's music you can't understand going on around you. Much better to keep up, keep moving.

So even though I tolerate the old, when it's not nostalgic, I have a preference for the new.

Today I was at the mall, and I was shopping at Express, and they played a song, "I know that you want the candy; I know that you want the candy . . ." da da da da da.

My first thought was, "Oh, it sounds just like the Jesus and Mary Chain, only new!" I was way, way into the Jesus and Mary Chain, like, I don't know, a million years ago. I remembered how much I loved the Jesus and Mary Chain, and I thought, I could go buy one of their records. But then I thought, "Oh, no, no, that's nostalgia, that's no good. Can't do that."

Fortunately, I was right that this song was the Jesus and Mary Chain, only new. I got home and googled it, and discovered it's by the Raveonettes, a current group, and the iTunes review describes their sound as "Phil-Spector-meets-Jesus-and-Mary-Chain."

Since The Jesus and Mary Chain are described on Wikipedia as "reminiscent of Phil Spector" but with a "noisy post-punk treatment," I'd say the comparison is about as apt as it could be.

So, for me, the best of all possible worlds. Tomorrow I'll buy their album, Lust Lust Lust.

I an anti-nostalgia, but I had a powerful wave of it comes by when I read this sentence in the Wikipedia entry on, as they call them, JAMC:

"Playing in front of small audiences, the Mary Chain earned their notoriety by playing very short gigs, some lasting no more than 10 minutes and consisting of a constant wall of feedback and distortion, as well as playing with their backs to the audience and refusing to speak to them."

Ahh, the 80's. Such a kind and gentle era! Wasn't it?

All Hail Our Yellow Shirts! An Ice Hockey Extravaganza

2008-03-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm visiting Michigan for a term this winter, and we were out eating lunch in Ann Arbor one day and we saw a poster for the women's ice hockey team. At least, I thought it was for the women's ice hockey team, but I was wrong, it was the local high school girl's hockey team.

But it was a cute poster, and we thought to ourselves, hey, we could go see the UMich women's ice hockey team play a game.

Except, of course, we couldn't, because Michigan has no women's ice hockey team. Weird, but whatever. Anyway, we decided to check out the men's team. The regular season is always sold out -- there's a waiting list -- but last night there was a play-off game so we could get tickets pretty easily.

Here's how the ice looked before the game. Pretty cool.

I came right from work so I was wearing wedge-heeled shoes and a skirt and I was carrying my laptop in a large vinyl shoulder-bag. These were all style errors, big time, as everyone was wearing their Michigan gear and sneakers.

That's OK; I'm used to looking like a weirdo. As the game started, though, I got less and less relaxed about looking like a weirdo.

They have these things they do, the Blue fans. Their fight song is All Hail the Victor, so every five minutes when something happens or when nothing is happening the pep band plays the song, and when the song gets to the "Hail!" part, everyone stops clapping to punch their fist into the air.

Then, they like to all stand together -- especially the students -- and point at and taunt particular members of the other team. After a goal they point at and taunt the goalie, chanting, in unison, "It's all your fault, it's all your fault, it's all your fault, it's all your fault." Other times they chant, "You just suck, you just suck, you just suck, you just suck."

Here are the student fans in their yellow shirts. They're resting in the photo during a break in the action, but during play they all stand the whole time.

Writing it out it sounds kind of funny and cute, but it wasn't done in a funny or cute mood. It was angry, and intended to make the other team feel like scum. Like, for real.

This despite the fact that the other team -- the University of Nebraska, Omaha -- was clearly not as good, and was losing dramatically. The final score was 10 - 1, and the more goals UMich scored, the more angry and excited they got: One goal?? "You just suck! You just suck!"

Ugh, taunting a team losing by this kind of margin? I couldn't get into that. I also couldn't raise my fist in the air. Am I the only one who has dark associations with raising arms, and saying "Hail!" in very large uniform groups?

So I just clapped.

It felt menacing just in the sense that you got the feeling that this group of people was so keyed up, and so comfortable in their uniformity and their numbers, that if things were just a little different, they'd be entirely capable of setting a car on fire or something.

The fan I identified with most was the toddler in his dad's lap next to me. All he wanted out of the game was to watch the Zamboni. Hockey, scoring, skating, who cares? Zamboni! Zamboni! Zamboni! Zamboni! His dad kept explaining, "OK, a few more minutes, see, the clock goes down, then the players go off, and then it'll come!"

What a nice, non-aggressive, simple pleasure. In his honor, a final Zamboni picture.

So now I'm all curious about women's ice hockey. It's almost impossible for me to imagine the atmosphere at a women's game being like this. But maybe I'm just being naive. I don't know. If I find out I'll keep you posted.

Noko (n+1), I Feel Your Pain. But Why?

2008-03-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote recently about the strange relationship a person might have with his future selves. What if Noko (n) eats salad for dinner today to try to lose five pounds, and Noko (n+1) sabotages her efforts by ordering the creme brulee tomorrow? What if Noko (n+12) doesn't appreciate our efforts?

But, of course, we worry about our future selves, too. Constantly. Will they have enough money to retire on? Will they be healthy? Will they be suffering at next Tuesday's dentist appointment?

So. Why do we worry about our future selves? And how much should we worry?

In last Sunday's Times, Jim Holt reflects on the analogy between worrying about future selves and worrying about actual other people. He says the reason we worry about our future selves is that our evolutionary ancestors worried about their future selves.

OK, sure. As philosophers say, that's an explanatory reason, of a sort. It explains why, in the course of things, we are a certain way. But it's not an justificatory reason. It's not even a satisfying explanatory reason, in a way. It leaves open the question: Are we right to care about our future selves? And if we are, what makes this make sense? An evolutionary answer isn't going to solve that problem.

The question is important, because without an explanation of why we ought to care about our future selves, how are we going to answer the question of how much we ought to care about our future selves?

I'm inclined to say that in a way the question of "why" has no satisfactory answer. You care about your future self because it's you: it's more like caring about your present self than caring about someone else. In that case, the question of "how much" has no satisfactory answer either.

Holt imagines a person who doesn't care about his future self as someone who is really improvident: never saving for the future, never preparing for what's going to happen.

But even a person who doesn't want to sacrifice for his future self might care about his future self; he just isn't motivated to give up what he has now. He might still dread the bad things that are going to happen. He just doesn't dread them enough.

So how much should you dread the bad things that may befall your future self? The background assumption seems to be something like this: you should dread them the same about you would dread similar suffering of your present self. Rationality, on this view, requires you to treat your future self and your present self the same.

This Freakonomics post by Daniel Hamermish uses the example of cheating on your spouse to illustrate the concept of "hyperbolic discounting": "people overemphasize current pleasure and pain in comparing actions at different points in time." This leads them to "irrational" behavior.

Hamermish allows that one might properly "discount" for something being in the future, but seems to suggest that cheating is discounting too much. Indeed, hyperbolically so.

So how much is the right amount?

When I was a kid, in like seventh grade, there was a poster on our classroom wall that had a quote from a poem -- something about how the author wanted to burn bright and short like a star rather than endure long and cold like a planet.

I remember I always thought it was the darndest thing to put up in a kids' classroom. After all, adults are always trying to get kids to do the exact opposite: Do your homework! Don't smoke! Care about your future selves, guys!

Inviting the classic teen response: Why should I?

Why indeed? Ya got me.

Oversaturation

2008-03-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

Once a long long time ago when my only contact with blogs was my friends' blogs, I would sit there at work and be like, why don't they post more often? What the hell else are they doing that's so exciting and important that they can't post? And if they're doing something so exciting and important why don't they write about it? And here it is, and I haven't posted anything for like months, which is really the beauty of the co-written blog, because Noko Marie is putting up interesting things in the meantime. So I don't feel that bad, but I do feel a little bit bad.

Here's the deal, which you all already know, but still. I'm moving some place new. This hasn't kept me from posting because so much work is involved, although this weekend is the dreaded weekend of packing and it will suck. Still, moving, as I always forget in the meantime, although it leaves you with a series of small and annoying tasks to complete, is not all that physically complicated, especially for me right now where I am staying in a Best Western.

There is a huge psychological unease component and, separate but related, there is the overwhelming adjustment to a new place. For me this takes the form of everything being at least momentarily, gripping and important. When you've lived some place for a while, certain things are foreground, and others are background. There are the places you go and the places you don't really go, and every now and then you're like, "Oh, I should check out x." X can be a neighborhood or a museum or a cute little store or something entirely different. But you check X out and you fit X into a pre-existing framework in your mind, and that is that. Right now, though, in Bakersfield, which is the place to which I am moving, there is no foreground and no background. Every convenience store, every bar, all requires some kind of absorption. A place has to be made for it in my head.

Anyway, that's where all my mental energy is going. That, and motel room cable, which has been a very rewarding experience.

Also the other day a train roared through town, carrying tanks on it. Tank after tank after tank. Not tanks of gas, but Army tanks. That was a little scary.

Dress Made Out Of Plastic Shopping Bags On Headless Mannequin

2008-03-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

In the shop window, 'round the corner from my apartment.

Unisexuality: Where I Draw The Line

2008-03-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

Where I draw the line when it comes to unisexuality is right outside the door of the women's bathroom.

Last week's New Yorker had one of those funny, short, New Yorkerish things listed under "The Academy," discussing how toilets are theorized by intellectuals. It's called "Powder Room 101." It's cute; it's got amusing details.

The most interesting part to me is the opening anecdote. The professor of the class, they tell us, is just back from a meeting with NYU admin about the restrooms in a new building. Going to be unisex, evidently. The big questions is, "urinals"?

If I were designing a unisex bathroom myself, this would be a no-brainer: even though they're ugly they're obviously efficient and ecologically sound. So sure, put in the urinals.

But honestly, I am not in favor of unisex bathrooms. Or, let me qualify this: I am not in favor of doing away with segregated bathrooms. A mix would be nice, unisex on the fourth floor, segregated on the fifth, if you wanted to go to the trouble you could find yourself a women's-only bathroom.

I'm a little surprised at myself, because I'm usually in favor of mingling and against sex distinctions where they're unnecessary. And I went to a college with unisex dorm bathrooms, and wasn't bothered by it at all. I found it totally unexceptional.

But now, I occasionally have this strong feeling when I duck into the women's bathroom: "Ah. No men allowed. What a relief." Why do I have this?

I realize, on reflection, that it's a workplace feeling. The unisex bathrooms in the restaurant near my house are fine -- or rather, they would be fine if they weren't painted all in black with poor lighting. Having the men hand-washing while I redo my lipstick is fine.

In the workplace, though, I don't know. Sometimes my male co-workers alarm me; they ask me things at time when I'm not ready to answer, or they look uncomfortable when I ask them things that at a time when they're not ready to answer. I'm not ready to have them watch me trying to fix my hair, and I'm not ready to look at their penises while they use the urinals. OK, forget the urinals; I'm not ready to listen to them pee, either.

Nothing against guys. I figure they like having their own sort of separate space, too. And nothing against anyone else, either: transsexuals are welcome in my women's bathroom, too. And having a few unisex ones around should solve any other problems.

But I gotta say, leave my women's room alone.

And now for your viewing pleasure, a "funny toilet sign from Germany" that I got from a blog called "Look at this." (link).

The Nature Of Femininity: Two Photos

2008-03-03T16:40:00.000-08:00

I've never been into "chick flicks." In fact, romantic comedies of any kind make me squirm, and historical dramas bore me unless they're really great. I'm really more of an action movie sort of girl -- though I have to say that action movies have been declining lately. For instance: I was a big fan of the Die Hard series (especially of the Jeremy Irons villian!) but the Mission Impossible movies I didn't even bother with.

I do read a lot of novels, which may or may not be a girly thing to do. I tend to think of myself as someone who does not have girly tastes in literature, but surveying the last two months of reading suggests a more complicated picture.

Roughly in order, since Jan 1, we have: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, Blue Pills, by Frederik Peeters, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, How the Light Gets In, by M. J. Hyland (which I blogged about before), Him, Her, Him Again, The End of Him, by Patricia Marx, The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger, Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq, When the World was Steady, by Claire Messud, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (which I blogged about before), and The Futurist, by James Othmer.

Five of these ten books are by female authors, and looking at the list and remembering the books, I'm actually struck by the extent to which those five authors engage themes we associate with femininity: family, female adolescence, love, social worlds, the absence of love.

Not that those are only feminine themes, and many of them are addressed in the men's books. But it's also true that there are some guy-oriented themes in the male authors books that aren't so much in the women's books: work, rage, the state of the world.

All this just to say I was amused by this display at the bookstore last weekend, which didn't reflect my own tastes at all:

All that history! All those clothes! All that, uh, Victorianism! Do women long for the past?

After I left the bookstore I went to shop for a bag -- not a handbag, exactly, but I'm looking for something to carry my laptop in that's cooler than a backpack. I went to a department store, and saw this:

So shiny! So cool! So, uh, robotic! Do women long for the future?

I'm thinking maybe the answer to both of these questions is "Yes."