Quietly

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.

I Heart The USA

(Photo by Flickr user bsoist, here. Creative Commons licensed)

OK, I admit it, I do, I love the USA, I love it. I always have.

I'm from the USA; I've lived here almost all my life. Then in 2004 I got a job in Canada, so I moved, and, you know, Canada's a nice place, and it's a country with a lot of admirable policies and so on, but the truth is, I love the United States.

Like a lot of people, I am currently going a little nuts about the direction the country is going in. I hate some of the things the United States stands for. But it doesn't matter. What I love isn't a set of policies or decisions; what I love is the country itself.

Right now I am living in Canada, but for various complicated reasons I'm spending the next four months in the US, in Ann Arbor.

I'll tell you about Ann Arbor -- and about its wholesome, fresh-faced denizens -- another time.

What I'm thinking about now is, just what makes the US so goddamn lovable? I mean, lots of countries have democracy, crappy TV, urban sprawl, and lots of cars. What's so special about *us*?

Some years ago, The New Yorker ran a story about Yao Ming. The story described, if I'm remembering correctly, Yao Ming's mother, as a young person, being taken to see the Harlem Globetrotters when they were on a tour of China. Talking about it later, she said she'd never seen anything American, or anything remotely like the Harlem Globetrotters.

She said she thought to herself, "These Americans! They really know how to enjoy themselves!"

Right! It's true, we do! I don't know if it's our best quality, or our most important one, but it's an excellent quality, worthy of love and admiration.

I have a second story that is more complicated. I was riding the bus with a Canadian colleague, and I was trying to explain what it is I like so much about the United States. I was talking about the weird energy, the way everyone is always trying to out-cool everyone else. It's not about money at all: no matter how rich or how poor, everyone's trying to be funnier, to have cooler clothes, to top the next guy. Maybe more in poor cities than in rich ones: you ride the bus, and everyone's either a comedian, a tough guy, a lover, or Mister I-Got-It-Going-On. I was probably starting in on hip-hop, how American it is, and how cool.

My colleague excitedly started to tell me a relevant story. She'd been living in Boston with her girlfriend, and they were at a bar, and they overheard someone talking about Canada. "Ha!" these people said. "Those Canadians think they have slums, ghettos, with that 'Jane and Finch' area. That's nothing! Nobody's got ghettos like we do."

My colleague found this mystifying and hilarious. What on earth?? How could you be proud of poverty?

I know what she means. But I know what those Boston guys mean, too. It's not the poverty that anyone's proud of. It's something else -- it's whatever else gets made into the movies and TV shows that people watch all over the world. I don't know what it is, exactly. But I think it's got something to do with cool, with fun, with knowing how to enjoy ourselves.

It's just cool, the US. I don't know what else to say. I love it like you love a person: not because of the kind of friend it is, or because of how well it treats you, but regardless of those things.

It's not the kind of love that translates easily to another country.

Rational Teens, Crazy Adults

It's one of those things everybody knows: teenagers engage in risky behaviors because they have a feeling of invulnerability -- an emotive, but incorrect, sense that the odds are in their favor.

On Tuesday, The New York Times ran of those "everybody knows this, but it's false" stories (link here). In fact, the data show that teenagers generally overestimate the risks involved in their activities. Even more than adults, they tend to say that something bad is bound to happen, even more than it actually is.

The reason kids do risky things, it turns out, isn't that they don't know the risks, but rather that to them, the benefits simply outweigh the risks. They quite rationally judge that since the risk of pregnancy with unprotected sex is quite small, even when overestimated, and the thrill associated with the (possibly fleeting) opportunity is high, the rational action is to go ahead, get it on.

Ergo: reminding teens the activities are risky isn't going to work.

OK, fine. But then the story gets weird. The risk-prevention specialist featured in the article explains that where teens are actually going wrong isn't in judging risk, its in understanding "gist."

The “gist" of a situation is an overall sense of what is the best course of action. It's an intuitive judgment about what to do.

The Times quotes the specialist as saying, “Young people don’t get it. They don’t get the gist of a situation. Gist is based on one’s culture, background and experiences, and experience is what teens lack.”

Oh. I see. So if teenagers are making rational risk-assessment choices, and we're making intuitive judgments that reflect cultural expectations, they're the ones who are supposed to change their decision-making?

This strikes me as bullshit. Look, older people don't want teenagers doing risky things. And for good reasons. But that doesn't mean the teenagers themselves aren't thinking clearly.

The most you could say, I think, is that teenagers may be less capable than adults of predicting what things it will make them happy to have done in five years, as opposed to what things are going to make them happy now. But it's dumb to say they aren't accurately judging what they want now. They are. They just want more fun and excitement than adults do. And they want it more.

The "gist" of a situation is just a fancy way of talking about the fact that adults want certain things, and they want their children to want those things too.

My own opinion is that adults should just be honest here. Speaking for myself, I don't want young people to drive drunk, take too many drugs, have sex without condoms, etc. But the reason is just that I care about them, and it makes me feel bad if bad things happen to them. These are selfish motives, but they're the good kind of selfish motives -- the kind that say, "If you suffer I will suffer. So take care of yourself! Please!" Do it for me.

The "gist" specialist says the right approach is rather to train kids in strategies. From The Times: "In helping a teenage girl resist spontaneous, unprotected sex, a gist-based approach has her practicing ways to say “no” and not worry about losing her boyfriend.

Ohhh brother. Don't even get me started.

Jingle Bell Time/It's A Swell Time

So in theory I feel like there's too much stuff in the world, an impression borne out by the fact that Pottery Barn is selling fake fur throw blankets for over $100, which blows my goddamn mind. And the exchange of presents is in some part responsible for this excess of stuff, because it means that people are buying things for other people that those other people do not particularly want, and also our financial constraints means that we are buying each other lots of cheapish stuff, which seems even more wasteful.

Nevertheless, I am pro-present.

Getting someone a present that they really like is the best way I know to show you care. It involves effort and attention and comprehension. Also, in some ways, being given something you really like feels like a compliment. This other person saw this cool thing out there in the world, and when they saw it, they thought of you. There's something really nice about that.

This is why gift lists and telling other people what we want is so much less fun -- it brings presents back into the world of autonomy and decisions and choices.

But I understand that the risk of the kind of present-giving I am advocating is that you will get things that you don't like, things that feel, even, a little insulting. "You thought I would like that?" Etc. We've all either been in that position, or we've seen it on tv. The thing is, though, it allows for a different kind of generosity, the kind where you assume that your loved ones are doing the best they can, and mean nothing but the best, and, operating on that assumption, you fake thrilled surprise.

Also, none of this means that I am opposed to the sheepish gift-card giving mode of exchange, although I have been known to joke about people waiting in line for mall gift certificates. Because we are out there trying to be generous to our loved ones, and make their lives better and richer and fuller, and if gift cards are the best way you can think of to do that, that's not so bad.

So that's why I think gift giving is a good thing for being part of a human community. But also I just like shopping for things for people. I like seeing what's out there; I like trying to match gifts up with people. It's like a puzzle. There is that bad moment after you've bought everything when you think the gifts you're giving are crummy, but then you get to rely on the generosity of spirit of your family, and that's pretty nice too.

It's an imperfect world, and there's something great about those moments when we try to compensate the ones we love for that, when we try to snatch out of the darkness a fifteen dollar alarm clock where a hunter shoots a deer, hoping that maybe that will make it all better.

For Love Or The Game

is a feature in ESPN the Magazine. In it, they take some athlete, and his wife/girlfriend (pronouns used advisedly, although maybe once a year they switch it up by having the chick be the athlete) and a teammate or competitor, and then they ask the athlete questions and have the girlfriend and teammate try to guess what the answers are.

It's a front of the book kind of thing, designed to be stupid and funny; it is not as funny, in my opinion, as the semi-regular feature "Right Name, Wrong Number" in which they call people with the same name as famous sports figures and ask them the interview questions that you would ask the actual athlete, and the person answering gives straight ahead responses. That makes me laugh a huge amount. Also the "If Larry King Wrote For Us" feature, because that is also pretty goddamn funny.

Anyway, this "For Love Or The Game" thing is supposed to be light-hearted and they always ask the question "Who wears the pants?" to which the girlfriend or wife is apparently contractually obliged to answer either "I do" or "He'll say he does."

I have been reading ESPN the Magazine for about three years now. It comes out every two weeks; I think this feature is in at least every other issue.

Never once in that time has the non-spouse or girlfriend won. Not once.

I'm starting to feel like the whole thing is rigged. I have been reading this feature and the girlfriend's missed like three pretty easy questions in a row and I think we're heading for an upset and then she pulls it out.

It's not, I suppose, totally implausible that dating someone gives you an insight into their character that nobody else can match. But I guess it strikes me as equally plausible that ESPN the Magazine operates on the reasonable assumption that we would don't want to hear that Mike Modano's wife does not actually know him as well as his teammate Darryl Sydor does.

But it's this funny ritualized enactment of what relationships are supposed to be like. The girlfriend says at least one drastically wrong thing, the buddy cracks some jokes, the girlfriend demonstrates her strength by refusing to fall in with any idea that the guy wears the pants, but accepts the concept wholesale, and at the end the power of true love as a basis for knowledge, faulty as it may be, is reaffirmed.

It's A Tribute To Dear Abby, As Well As A Tribute To Somebody Else

Confidential to N.M. in Western NY:

Happy Birthday! You're a hero!

Women In Love

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a while, but I've been reluctant. Mostly because haunted by a suspicion that what I see as a phenomenon is only my own little rorschach test, reflecting back my hopes and fears.

The topic is this: How often a discussion of a famous woman of the past involves her unhappiness and failures at love, usually of the embarrassingly unrequited variety. If I were a certain kind of person, I might have clipped and copied the articles and books and so forth that struck me as bringing this home, but mostly I just read them with a certain amount of discomfort and worried what it said about me that I was so struck by their failed and unhappy love lives, rather than their triumphant achievements.

But this is the data set that I'm thinking of. Nancy Mitford, whom the Wikipedia article describes as carrying on a "largely one-sided affair." Emily Dickinson -- at least according to my recollection of an introduction to her poetry which dealt heavily with her embarrassing enthusiasm for some local worthy. Charlotte Bronte's love for that Brussels teacher. Emma Goldman: there's a book out covering one of her relationships and showing that, according to one review, "[d]uring this passionate and stormy relationship, Goldman lectured in public about free love and women's independence, while in private she struggled with intense jealousy and longed for the comfort of a secure relationship." New Yorker articles on Lucinda Williams and Sylvia Plath (Al Alvarez, who I think turned it into a book, castigates himself for not fucking Sylvia Plath when, he says, she wanted him to, blames himself for her suicide, and talks about how disgustingly dirty her hair was) and Simone De Beauvoir (the crucial quote: "Though her affairs, for the most part, were love affairs, it is plain from almost every page she wrote that she would have given them all up if she could have had Sartre for herself alone").

There are probably more I could think of. Even so, it's a scattered and random group, hardly even deserving the term "data set". Possible thoughts: as noted earlier, this is my private psychological issue and my own prurience is responsible for my alarm at these articles and books and coverage. Or you could say yes, these particular woman had issues with love and desire and stability and the fact that those aspects of their lives are covered and discussed is just our natural fascination with the inner lives of our culture heroes -- the same articles would be written in the same tone if they were men. Or you could say that the fact that all these women had these issues suggests that some kind of odd pressures exist on women, pressures that drive them both towards and away from domestic happiness in striking ways.

Or you could say that we as a culture are particularly obsessed with the successful domestication of women, that we see that as a central focus of any woman's life in a way that we don't when looking at men.

(But maybe this is all me. Maybe Henry James is treated as much as a cautionary tale as Emily Dickinson; certainly his failure to partner was discussed in some pretty goddamn prurient ways.)

I don't know. I've talked about it with friends, but mostly only female ones, I think it's a real thing.

Even if I'm right, I don't know what the thing that I'm looking at is; I don't know what it shows. There's some kind of uneasiness there, about women and their private lives and their public lives and their more or less successful domestication, I think. Even if it's all in my head, we can at least establish that I personally am uneasy about those issues, and I, like Mrs. Pearce, am a woman, which could be the start of another data set.

I don't know.

Inanimate Objects Have Feelings Too

I used to use Safari, and only Safari, and then Noko Marie pointed out that if I used Firefox I could link to things without typing in the links by hand, and so I started using Firefox for the blog, and then I just got into the habit of using Firefox, and now I haven't used Safari for months and months, and I feel kind of bad about it. I was just using Safari, moments ago, and it didn't remember any of the websites I wanted to go to, and the whole experience felt blank and sad, like when you lose touch with an old friend and then you get together to catch up, but you don't really have anything in common anymore so the whole experience actually leaves you feeling less close to them, because at least in your head they were still a major part of your life, but now you've been confronted by the harsh reality of the situation.

Once, when I was eight, I decided I wanted to keep a (grocery store bought) orange as a pet. It didn't end well. I don't remember the details. I think there was mold. I had a shoebox for it and everything.

When I was in high school, everybody had names for their cars. Actually, I still know a lot of people who have names for their cars. Or computers or ipods or whatever.

I like stuff; I know I've mentioned that before. I like my stuff in particular. And some of that's because of what I think it says about me, or because I think it's an extension of me, but some of it's that helpless human impulse towards emotional attachment.

When I was first quitting smoking, a friend of mine told me that her husband said that it was like having your best friend die. I would say it's more like having a terrible irrevocable falling out with your best friend. Not just in degree of unpleasantness, but qualitatively. There was this thing, and you had a relationship with it, and now you're turning your back on it, you're walking away. And I know that smoking doesn't miss me, at least I think I do, but it still feels kind of like a betrayal.

Major League

I really love the movie Major League.

I love it so much that I kind of make a pain out of myself, talking about how much I love it and bringing it up at every opportunity. And then I start worrying that I don't actually love the movie that much, that I bring it up to be different or interesting or because I think it's funny.

Then I watch it and I remember how much I love it.

I'm not always entirely sure what I love about it. I'm not going to be claiming any time soon that it's one of the world's best movies, only that it's one of the world's most enjoyable movies to watch.

I think partly it's got to do with the way the movie actually replicates the experience of watching your team do better than you expected it to do. It's got this nice lazy stretched out feeling to it, where a bunch of players make more of an effort than they did before, and Charlie Sheen gets glasses, and then they're winning games that they expected to lose and doing American Express commercials. And it kind of is shown from the perspective of the fan: they spend a lot of time at the beginning showing Cleveland, and they take shots from above the stadium, and they have the guys arguing along the way, and people hugging in bars when the team wins (which once upon a time I would have said was pie in the sky, but I actually have hugged strangers in bars after my team won a playoff game and I'm not ashamed of it) and the way the players act is the way you want to imagine your team being on the inside where you can't watch them, even down to Corbin Bernson, who plays the rich asshole who, it turns out, still loves baseball on the inside.

(Here, I guess, is my big chance to share that I read the Esquire profile on Kobe Bryant, which revealed that a) Vanessa demanded to act as his stylist and b) she asked for more money than they offered for doing so.)

It makes the world feel strangely safe, Major League, which I guess makes more sense of the fact that the writer/director also wrote The Sting, and co-wrote Sleepless in Seattle, because as different as those movies are, I kind of remember them having the same effect.

I really hate when people switch sports teams. And sometimes I argue about this and try to score points of other people for it, because in my book it's just something that you don't do, and I don't have a reasoned position on it other than that only bad people switch sports teams.

But I think one reason I hate it is because it detracts to one extent or another, from the feeling of safety that you get watching your team having a better than expected season. It's precious and safe because you had to root for them anyway. If you could just root for anybody, you'd have to decide if these guys were really loveable losers or just kind of annoying, and if maybe those scrappy Red Sox were a better bet. Moveable fandom means that you just have another variety of mature adult relationship with your team. That's obviously ridiculous and pathetic.

That said, I couldn't tell you what the Lakers record is right now.

File Under Life Is Unfair

I just can't seem to stay away from the advice columns.

So today, on Dear Prudence, which we know what I think about, this woman wrote in. And, to paraphrase, she and her German husband agreed before he was willing to propose (but she was kind of drunk!) that they would live in America for five years, and then move to Germany. And now the five years are up and she doesn't want to move to Germany. She wants to stay in America. Her parents are needy. She's going to have a kid. She doesn't know German, although she's tried, a little bit.

And Dear Prudence says that they need to take the deadlines and pressure off and talk about it and acknowledge that one person is going to feel always slightly screwed.

Which, I guess, to the extent that you think the sanctity of marriage is important, is probably right, because the letter writer seems prepared to throw a huge fit about moving to Germany. And I guess some of the whole premise of marriage is that circumstances change, that things that seemed worthwhile and super-important before you get married seem less important afterwards, that the person you love should be more important than some half-baked condition you set way back five years ago. I wouldn't know for sure, myself.

It just seems unfair in one of those no right answer ways. You tell this woman, look, I'll marry you if you'll agree to move to Germany for five years. The promise to marry being what a contracts professor would call "consideration." And you do what you promised to do, and now she's saying that it's too much to ask her to do what she said she would, that you're not properly understanding the difficulties of her position. When she had the opportunity years earlier to consider the difficulties of her position and say, you know what, thanks, but no thanks.

I guess what really set me off about the whole thing, though, was this quote. "He is a lovely person but not terribly social, and he wants to move to Berlin—where he has no family and few friends—and I don't feel comfortable relying on him to make new friends for us."

I don't know if I've already written something about this (this being the abstract point I'm about to make); I know I've talked about it with everybody who reads this blog. She wants to stay in America. He wants to go to Germany. It's not enough for her to say, "I promised; I've changed my mind; please don't make me go to Germany."

She has to give reasons. She has to explain why it's better for everyone that they don't go to Germany. It's not enough to have a simple game of chicken, where they each decide what the relationship is worth to them vis a vis their presence in a foreign country. She has to be right, too. Even if it's right in a cheap-shot kind of way. I hate that. It's some kind of repulsive colonization of other people's preferences. It should be stopped.

A Sentimental Sinister Music

So I got (as a present, which was tremendous) a cd of the Psychedelic Furs. I had two Psychedelic Furs cds back in high school and listened to them over and over again, and then sometime in college I decided I needed to be cooler in my musical tastes (and I liked the Psychedelic Furs to much to think they were cool, plus nobody else I knew was really listening to them) and so I sold them at Amoeba for a Willie Nelson cd, and have regretted it ever since, although it is hard to regret anything that brings more Willie Nelson into your life.

A quick note about my musical life: I would get super-obsessed with particular bands and cds, and I would listen to the cds over and over again, but this almost never translated into buying more albums or learning more about the band, it just involved complete memorization of and devotion to those songs.

And what I loved about the Psychedelic Furs is that it was mostly sad music, at least according to my 17 year old standards ("and it feels like love, but it don't mean a lot" or whatever -- listen to the lyrics of Pretty in Pink sometime), but it had this sweeping love song feel to it -- it was a valorization, a romanticization, of the failures and boundaries of love and human existence.

Other examples of this feeling: the entire oeuvre of The Fire Inside by Bob Seger, Sleeping With The Television on by Billy Joel, Perfect Skin by Lloyd Cole.

I kind of want to argue that this was a more prevalent mood in the songs of my youth, but then I remembered that I don't know anything about current pop, so I could be totally wrong. Also, it's not like those things actually came out when I was young.

What I do feel is that we're instructed sometimes that only successful, meaningful things should be celebrated, should give rise to sweeping, romantic sounding songs. And there's something about songs that celebrate the weakness of human capabilities for love and affection, but celebrate them in a sweeping romantic way. Not a dry little ditty, but you know, a synthesizer fest. Where it could come on the radio and it takes you a couple minutes and some sustained attention to realize that it's not just a love song.

Because these aren't songs about rejected lovers, which there are lots of. There's the Cure for that. These are songs about not-quite lovers, about the ridiculousness of the search for love. But they make it sound noble, worthy on its own terms. It felt kind of dangerous when I listened to it at 17, and I guess it still kind of does. Deliberate sentimentality in celebration of triviality -- it's a mood that I would like to be able to sustain.

I Love The Change Of Seasons

It's fall here in Toronto. Just this week it got crisp and chilly; everyone got a little overexcited to wear their new fall clothes, and, of course, most importantly, hockey season started.

I'm one of those people who goes around boring their friends by going on and on about how much I love the change of seasons. If you live in place that is cold in winter, and you like it well enough not to be pining for a move, you can get a little defensive about it. Even the people living around you are like, "Ugh! Don't you wish we were in Arizona?"

Well, no. Because somewhere in the top twenty or so reasons I never wish to be in Arizona there is the fact that, you know, I love the change of seasons.

So, what's so great about it anyway? It's not like I really like cold weather so much; I don't play hockey; I don't even ski.

Well, of course, the seasons each carry their own particular charms. Fall brings "fall fashions." Just today I'm wearing my knee-high boots, tights, a skirt, a shiny jacket, and a weird new scarf made partly of linen. I feel invincible, attractive, and ready for anything. It's like a cross between a gladiator outfit and a schoolgirl uniform. And yet it looks totally normal. What could be more fun and delightful?

You know cold-weather clothes are awesome because even in California, the stores all stock up on them. Sure, it's only for two weeks in January and that trip to Vail in March, but hey, don't you want that adorable matching scarf and mitten set?

You can't talk about fall and winter, though, without talking about the ways that "bad weather" can be a source of a unique kind of excitement and pleasure. Nothing makes being inside more fun than bad weather outside. Instead of feeling like "We're sitting around at home, bored," you feel, "Ooh, it's cozy and nice in here! Look at all that goddam snow!"

The corollary to this is that since you get "cabin fever" being home too much, the cold makes people gather together inside in public instead of being out pursing dispersed pleasures. All over the city, the bars and restaurants are now packed, full of people who spent the summer lolling around the beach. It's crowded everywhere. And it'll be even more so in winter.

The ice-skating rink at City Hall in downtown Toronto. Is this cute or what? Photo by Flickr user 416style, here. (Creative Commons licensed).

Also, bad winter weather lets people overcome the natural shyness that they seem to develop as they get older. When you're an adult, there's usually no real reason to stay out, to have another martini, to then exchange the kind of confidences that drinking too much leads to. We're grown-ups; we have to get up in the morning; yada yada yada.

But if the snow is piling up outside and you're going to freeze your little tootsies off as soon as you go out, the temptation is overwhelming: oh, sure, give me another one.

Of course, this last works inversely if you and your friends are driving, in which case the snow makes everyone leave early. And in general, winter weather is way more irritating and downright depressing if you drive. There's nothing like chipping ice of the windsheild at 7am on a cold winter morning to make you want to kill yourself.

I admit it. My answer is: no driving. I take the bus, and the subway; I walk; occasionally I take a taxi. Once you're on foot, the snow changes from a menace to a bunch of cottony fluff.

Of course, spring needs no defense; everyone is familiar with the obvious and totally accurate stereotype: life, love, sex, flowers. And summer, too: sunshine, tank tops, sandals.

My only complaint with the seasons is that winter is too long. It just goes on and on; you feel like you're going out of your mind. Of course, it's possible that you only feel really berserk in spring if you've suffered through an interminable winter, or that there's some proportionality or something. So it's a trade-off.

This is why I can never understand "utopias," or heaven, or whatever. How could things be perfect? You'd always be missing something.

I guess in the classical conception heaven is supposed to be more like 70 degrees and low-humidity than a burst of sunshine on a cool March morning. Does that mean I don't get to bring my red leather gloves? I always knew this whole thing "afterlife" thing was a scam.

The Things We Want -- We Want Them

In his popular book Stumbling On Happiness, Dan Gilbert argues that we're pretty bad at predicting how happy and unhappy things are going to make us.

He makes a persuasive case. You might have thought losing your job, or a limb, or going to jail would make you really unhappy, but you'd be overstating the case. After a little time of adjustment, most people go back to being about as happy as they were before these things happened to them.

Conversely, you might have thought winning the lottery or finally hooking up with those Brazilian twins might make you really happy, but you'd be overstating the case there, too.

Interestingly, most people expect to regret action more than inaction, and so take a sort of cautious approach to things. But in fact, people are much more likely to regret inaction (p. 179).

OK. What are we supposed to do with this information?

Here Gilbert gets a little vague. If you want to know how happy or unhappy something will make you, you're more likely to get an accurate answer if you ask someone who has been through a comparable experience than if you just try to project yourself into the future.

But then what? In the beginning of the book, Gilbert makes a case for happiness as the main goal of human life. He implies that not only do we seek happiness above all else, we can't help but do so. To those who say we ought to seek something else, say virtue, Gilbert says the proposal must be that virtue will make us happy, and then happiness is revealed to have been the true goal all along (p. 36).

If you put these ideas together, you get a really surprising and weird set of conclusions, though Gilbert never draws them. What you get is: if you desparately want to keep your job, or your limbs, or not go to jail, well, you're making a kind of mistake. You probably shouldn't worry about these things so much.

Don't worry about marrying the man of your dreams, or about staying healthy. And don't worry about having children either -- people with children tend to be less happy too, at least while the kids are small.

These conclusions make no sense to me. The things we want -- we want them. Not just because we expect them to make us happy, but because wanting is a kind of elemental human activity.

And if we desperately want, say, our loved ones to stay alive, I can't help but feel that we are right to do so. Even if their deaths would, in the long run, not make us much less happy.

Our desperate desires for the continued existence of the people we love, for our own health and security, for our freedom, maybe for children, are good, because these things are worth wanting. If they don't make us happy, the problem seems rather to be with happiness than with wanting.

So I couldn't help but read the whole book as a kind of reductio of the initial premise that the main goal in life must be happiness.

What are the alternatives? Gilbert is a little snippy about philosophers, who he things have muddled the happiness-concept waters. "For two thousand years," he writes, "philosophers have felt compelled to identify happiness with virtue because that is the sort of happiness they thing we ought to want" (p. 36).

This isn't right: almost no philosophers identify happiness with virtue. But they have been going on about wanting and happiness for centuries. It seems to me what they've been trying to do is to figure out whether there's anything interesting to say about the difference between what we do want and what we ought to want. And what it might be.

Gilbert writes as if what we want is happiness, but his examples seem to show that this is false. What we want are new cars, clothes, love, sex, health, and so on and so on, regardless of whether these things make us happy.

So maybe what he means is that we ought to want what makes us happy. To me, the examples seem to show this is false as well: of course we ought to want love, and the health and freedom of ourselves and those around us, whether or not it makes us happy.

I'm inclined to say these reflections show that when you're trying to figure out what you ought to want, reflections on desires are going to be a better starting point than reflections on happiness.

If this is right, the practical advice to trust the happiness judgments of others is misguided.

If you're going to be asking advice, ask what others judge worth wanting, not what makes them happy. The answers will probably be love, health, family, friends, and fun. Maybe sex with Brazilian twins. All the things that Gilbert says won't really make us much happier.

But who cares? They're worth wanting all the same.

My Wikiphilia

I love Wikipedia.

A while ago, a friend and I were wondering: which episode of Beavis and Butthead is it that Beavis claims he is being sexually harassed by a classmate, because she is so attractive that she "gives him a stiffie"?

A google search brings up the relevant Wikipedia article immediately. In the entry, "Sexual Harassment (Beavis and Butt-head episode)," you learn everything you need to know: the girl's name is Kimberly; it happens in social studies class; the boys take their claim to court; it all ends badly when they're called into judge's chambers to be reprimanded and they accuse her of sexually harassing them.

There's even a cute picture of the two of them getting all excited, and a link to "frivolous litigation" in case you wanted to check out what, exactly, they get in trouble for at the end.

Beavis in more light-hearted times, enjoying some nachos at the beach.

Well. Civilization has arrived. We no longer have to stumble around in ignorance. There are Wikipedias in over 200 languages. You can see the list, here.

But as every Wikipedia user knows, Wikipedia can be infuriating. Sure, if you want to know the chemical make-up of arsenic, or the population of Nepal, or whatever happened to Marc Bolan, you're in business.

But if you want to know about the concept of autonomy, or the history of Al-Qaeda, or whether the Landmark Forum is a cult-slash-pyramid scheme, you'll get the familiar directive: please see the talk pages.

In its early stages, the Wikipedia guys were kind of purists about the user-generated content business. They were totally anti-hierarchy. As time has gone on, though, they seem to have become more pragmatic. Some users are known, and thus trusted. Some users are so trusted they have the power to block edits. And so on. This is good, I think: a little hierarchy is necessary when subjects are controversial.

So some of these endless talk page discussions may end in high-quality entries, eventually.

But user-wikis are also just better suited to some things than others. On this page, Wikipedians explain that they have more, and better, entries in the sciences and technology than in arts and humanities. They say that's because early users were likely to be geeks.

But I don't think that's the whole reason. It's in the nature of, say, chemistry, that a student with a good textbook can put up high-quality information in minutes. Writing about ideas is harder. If I am going to write a short, informed, readable article on autonomy, I'm going to use a lot of mental energy, a lot of time, a lot of care, to get it right. (Likely depleting my active self; see previous post here).

If someone comes along with Autonomy for Dummies and edits my entry, I'm going to be mad.

Sometimes, too, I just miss the feeling of identity on Wikipedia. Who is this Wikipedia ghost, who took the time to transcribe Beavis's misadventures?

And in case you were considering a sex-harassment suit, please remember, as Wikipedia says here, "As some articles may contain errors, please do not use Wikipedia to make important decisions."