My Rational Emotive Elephant

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.

The Empty Nest Syndrome Of My Mind. Or Not.

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.

I Am An Unreliable Narrator

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.

A Bar-Raiser From Way Back

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.

Disorientated

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.

I'm An Anti-Hoarder

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!

Happiness and Memory

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

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.

Dreams, The Retelling Of

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.

INXS

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.

Some Incoherence About Sentimentality

My dictionary defines "sentimental" as "marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism"; it perhaps indicates just how sentimental I am that I cannot see exactly what that definition excludes.

I am sentimental. I am sentimental in trivial ways: I cry at the national anthem, or montages of the recently and heroically dead, I save letters and photos. I am sentimental in a more profound way: I ascribe emotional meaning to the world as it is presented to us, and, perhaps more importantly, I generally tend towards ascribing a kindly, or at least tender, emotional meaning to that world, when possible.

If you think of that line from "What A Wonderful World" that goes, "I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, they're really saying I love you" you will have a fairly precise understanding of what my brand of sentimentality involves.

Of course, you can't sustain that mood of kindly smoothing over all the time. When hungry or pissy or nervous that's not how I feel at all. And, of course, there's the mood of seemingly misplaced sentimentality: something that you felt sentimental about -- a job, a date, a place -- turns a different side of itself to you, and then you get the horrible feeling that maybe the sentimentality you viewed it with was a matter of falsifying the experience, a psychic airbrushing. And I don't, really, have any desire to live in a world of illusion, whatever the background music.

But it's all a little academic, thinking it through like this, because I have not ever been able to escape my sentimentality. My efforts to do so, to adopt a strictly realist view of the world, have only ever succeeded in acting as so much concealer for the sentimental zit underneath.

If I wanted to be mean-spirited about it, I guess I could see my sentimentality as a kind of emotional capitalism, where experience, stored away, gains interest in the form of a vague benign glow that covers the good times and bad times alike. I don't know. I'm going to take a stroll, and look up at the new moon, and think kindly thoughts about the world we live in.

No Little Girls Allowed!

That's what this sign, at the YMCA, means: No Little Girls Allowed! How often do you see that?

Actually the little girl outline with the circle and bar through it is kind of pasted onto the original sign. It's meant to clarify: this is the Adult Women's Locker Room, not the Girls' and Women's Locker Room, and also not the Family Locker Room.

That's right: at the Ann Arbor Y, there are five locker rooms: One for girls and women, one for women only, one for boys and men, one for men only, and one for mixed families.

Five locker rooms, well, it's an awful lot.

Sometimes I'm really glad it's all separate like this, because I get a little overwhelmed with all the kids and parents and its nice to change and shower in peace.

I go to the Y around around 6 - 7pm or so. It's a huge new Y with two gigantor pools, very nice, and lots of space. In the common areas, there are lots and lots parents, taking their kids to lessons: basketball and swimming, especially.

At that hour, you can tell the kids are a little worn out. And the parents are worn out too. And yet, clothes have to get changed; snacks have to be postponed; since it's Ann Arbor and it's freezing jackets have to get all zipped up before anyone goes back outside. It's just far enough from most people's homes that everyone drives there so the parking lots is crowded and crazy with cars. There's often an actual line up, like 10 people, at the indoor, airport-style parking pre-payment machine.

It's a recipe for crabbiness -- for kids and parents -- that is no one's fault. And man, even though the kids look delighted when they're actually playing games and swimming, there is a lot of general crabbiness otherwise. I can't help it -- I have a low tolerance. Watching the necessary and constant impulse-restriction of the children makes me feel depressed about human life. It makes me feel like "I want a cookie," "No, you can't have a cookie now. Maybe later" kind of sums up the whole human-existence business, pretty much, which is a dark thought.

So often, I'm happy to escape into the quiet of the Adult Women's Locker Room.

But then, you know, the last two days in the Adult Women's Locker Room, what I've overheard is just endless discussions of diet and weight loss. "Did you eat salad yesterday?" "You know, two tablespoons of Ranch dressing has, like, 40 grams of fat?" "How do you deal with McDonald's cravings?" "I lost 1.5 pounds."

Um, so even in the Adult Women's Locker Room, it seems life is basically just "I want a cookie." "No, you can't have a cookie now. Maybe later."

It's a good thing I've got M. I. A.'s new album Kala on my iPod to remind me of why life is worth living.

Celebrity Gossip: Does The Object Matter?

So somebody gave me The Nine for Christmas, which is one of the new Supreme Court books, and one that I was pretty eager to read. But one of the reasons I was so eager to read it was that a friend who had already read it told me it had all kinds of dirt about the justices, including the fact that David Souter eats a yogurt and an apple for lunch, which is kind of a striking fact.

David Lat has made a career out of collecting this stuff -- the fact that it's out there isn't news, nor, I guess, is the kind of hand-wringing I'm about to engage in.

Why the hell do I care what David Souter eats? Do I care because he's a justice of the Supreme Court, or do I care because I like collecting facts about other people, especially facts that seem weird? Is there any difference between my interest in David Souter and Britney Spears? How about the guy across from my apartment who yells at his girlfriend?

It's always fun, although I guess maybe it used to be more fun, to pick the perfect subjects of the New Yorker Talk of the Town piece. The stained glass restorer, the last maker of hand-crafted bricks, the person who tracks the migration of some particular kind of bunny rabbit. And then you could do your best to mimic the New Yorker style of discussion, the bland presentation of personal eccentricity. But there's some of the same thing there -- what's the point of knowing these things about these people? Is it that there's some particular merit to the stained glass profession? Is it another way of contemplating human variety?

Or is it just some kind of drive to know what's going on with other people, whoever they may be? We want to be behind the scenes, we want to wrap our hands around some kind of vision of who these people are, really.

Rooting Interests

Temple was playing Duke tonight and I was at a bar where that game was on one tv, and once the other tv stopped showing "Jeopardy" (a word, it turns out, that I intuitively screw up the spelling on), which I was on a goddamn roll with, I started watching a little bit of it.

I only throw in the Jeopardy to make it clear that my night was not centered around Temple/Duke. In fact, I had misremembered the location of Temple, which falls in my Valparaiso file of schools that play in the NCAA tournament but that I don't know where they are.

But so within about five minutes I'm rooting for Temple. Based mostly on the perpetual smarminess of Duke players who dive for loose balls as if they're saving the goddamn world, but also on some left over file of dislike for Coach K. who I'm sure is no more horrific than any other Division I basketball coach, but who gets more widely praised for it, and who also believes that his coaching insights can lead people to business success. Also it was a pretty fun sports-watching experience when UConn took down a super-heralded Duke team in 1999.

I think it's a little strange though, that I started rooting for either side in this contest. I always do it, too. Show me a curling match, and within five minutes I will have a curling side that I am pulling for. This preference can get stronger or weaker, depending on how intense my watching involvement is and how closely my preferences are confirmed, and it can carry over from one game to the next -- I have this lingering fondness for the Houston Rockets based on my watching experiences from 1995. I don't know; maybe I should be cultivating neutrality.

I had a Jeopardy competitor I was rooting for too.

I left before the game was over; Temple, ESPN tells me, lost by 10.

Real Property

Growing up could be described as the act of trading in one set of illusions for another. But that would be glib, and probably untrue.

The illusion of mine that I miss the most was what I thought it meant to own land. I spent much of the years from 1984 to 1990 daydreaming about owning property. Mostly of an unconventional kind. I blame the Swiss Family Robinson, My Side of The Mountain kinds of books, which encouraged me in the belief that you could make your home in a tree. I daydreamed about that. Also, oddly, about owning a small corner of my school, like a secret room, where I could retreat to during the day. It would just be a single room, but somehow I would have title to it and it would be mine.

I thought ownership of land was absolute, that it was something that you bought that could never be taken away from you, that you could return to no matter what happened. Even at the time, I wasn't sure how the mechanics of buying the land worked, and I had a vague inkling that it could be problematic to talk the state or the school board into selling me that mysterious secret room, not to mention that I had no money. But once I owned it, I thought, it would be mine.

Sadly, I grew up and learned that it doesn't work like that. Land can be taken away from you by eminent domain, by failure to pay property tax, whatever. Also, even if it's not taken away from you, it's not as though you can do what you like with it. There are regulations and requirements and lawsuits waiting to happen.

I'm still startled by my primitive capitalism as a kid, by my desire to carve out a chunk of the world, however small, that nobody else could touch. I'm also startled by its persistence. Sometimes I'm someplace beautiful, and my overriding thought is a desire to own it, to have it be mine. It's a funny deep down possessiveness, not really susceptible to reason; it can be covered up but not erased.

Some Brief Thoughts On Makeup

I have been going through a mildly pro-makeup phase, recently. Wearing lipstick, buying perfume, the occasional mascara experiment.

This is not, despite my stated goal of dressing neutrally, the first time this has happened. Every now and then I get this image in my head: some cream eyeshadow, a brick red lipstick, something that strikes me as tremendously appealing which I go out and purchase and play with.

Usually I give it up after a couple of weeks.

The main reason I usually wind up giving up is a feeling of self-consciousness about the whole experiment. I get overwhelmed by the sense that I am saying to the world: I look better this way. I smell better this way. I think this is a good thing to do. And I imagine a phalanx of people looking at me, shaking their heads, saying to themselves, "Is she out of her mind?"

If your clothes don't, at least on the surface, seem to be striving for anything, nobody can ever confront you with your failures.

It seems even harder, or more intimidating, to strive for femininity; I feel like I'm on the brink of exposure as a fraud.

(Written down it seems neurotic.)

You can avoid this fear, and sometimes I have, by making your clothes a deliberate provocation. You wear the brightest lipstick. You wear a hat. You wear elaborate jewelry. You tell the world that this is a light-hearted game, that you are in on the joke.

I am still not entirely sure what drives me into my pro-makeup moods in the first place. Another unknowable impulse.

You Don't Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Either

Last week I reread Catcher in the Rye. I read it just after rereading Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. I realize this is a lot of rereading, but you know, when times are tough sometimes a little familiarity is like a warm bath. Repitition induces comfort.

On the face of it, they're pretty different books. The Salinger book is about a rich kid, the Russo book is about a poor grownup -- or, rather, a lot of poor grownups and a few who are somewhat less poor.

One thing they have in common, though, is that they both describe people who are fundamentally in the dark about the reasons for their own behavior. In Nobody's Fool, Sully is constantly surprised by his own impulses, both kindly and otherwise. More than deciding to do things, he just sort of, you know, finds himself doing them.

In Catcher in the Rye, poor Holden is so mystified by his own behavior that he can only say over and over, "Sometimes I'm really crazy. I really am." Why does Holden propose to a girl he has just told us he hates? Why does he try to convince her to move to Vermont with him and start life over from nothing? He has no idea. There are probably reasons, but Holden isn't really in on them.

This resonates with me a big way. It not only describes the way my own inner life feels, it describes how other people seem to me, even when they are pretending they're all, you know, deliberative and purposeful and shit.

I once saw a talk by the philosopher John Doris, challenging the idea that rationality -- the normal quality we attribute to healthy human adults -- could possibly be understood in terms of reflective deliberation followed by action.

He cited study after study showing people could be induced to particular behaviors for reasons completely unknown to them. Like, if you show people word lists, the people who see lists like "Shuffleboard Florida cruise Early Bird special" walk more slowly to the elevator. If you ask them why, they cite some "reason" -- "Oh, my toe hurts today" -- but never the real reason, which is these words just remind them of aging.

He argued in his paper that rationality was more the process of imposing a coherent narrative on the way things have unfolded.

Whatever you think about that, it's certainly true that some people are extremely good at imposing coherent narratives on their past choices -- even when it seems obvious to an outside observer that those choices were made for no good reason at all, were basically the life equivalent of walking slowly to the elevator.

If you're really honest with yourself, you might be less inclined to believe these narratives. You feel, "Well, sure I could tell that story. But who knows whether it's true?" This strikes me as just one of the ways that genuine self-knowledge might be bad for a person. Blind trust in the narrative makes life easier.

Of course, having this self-knowledge may be bad for you, but it may be good for the people around you, since it might make you more forgiving, less dogmatic, and more willing to entertain alternative points of view about yourself.

It's a trade-off.

I realized thinking about it that a lot of my favorite books are like this -- they describe characters who are blindsided, surprised, amused, dumbfounded by their own actions.

I don't know why I like these books. I mean, I could guess. But I'd probably be wrong.

A Post About Dog Shit

I feel a little weird posting about dog shit, but it's only to make a larger point, so I hope you can put up with it. Also, I decided not to post the relevant pictures, although they would help you understand what the hell I'm talking about. There are limits to all things.

You can buy single Black & Milds at any convenience store in my neighborhood, and also when you see something brown on the sidewalk there's not too much doubt about what it is, as picking up your dog has a long way to go around here. But the other day there was something on the ground that resembled dog shit, but wasn't, as far as I could tell, dog shit. It was foamy, for one. Also, I later found some on the hood of somebody's car.

So my first thought is that it's dog shit, and then my second thought is that it's somebody's art installation trying to make some kind of point about dog shit. And it's the second point that caught my attention.

I don't actually think it was that; I didn't very much think it was that at the time. And then later when the foaminess vanished and there was just some brown dirt-like substance on the places where the putative art installation had been it seemed even less likely. I just thought it was funny that that's become my default category for things that confound my expectations of the world -- oh, it's somebody's mode of artistic expression.

I mean, here at the end times we all have points to make and many people make them in creative ways and you have Andre the Giant stickers and stencils, and graffiti, and billboards and all those elaborations of life. Last night I had a dream that a friend was having a party in one of those art communes/living spaces that the L.A. Weekly is always so excited about. Then in my dream it turned out the place was in Bakersfield, which just made it that much more elaborate.

I remember the first time I read a book by Henry James. It was really a conversion experience, because for the first time I felt like somebody was describing the world the way I understood it, with incredible ambiguities and hesitations and conflicting acts of delicacy. But now, a bit later on, I wonder how I would see the world if nobody had ever laid out that incredibly complex version for me. Would those ambiguities still exist in my head, or would I see the world differently and more simply?

What I Learned At Starbucks

Photo by Flickr user williamhartz, here. Used under Creative Commons license.

I spend a lot of time at Starbucks. I have three main Starbucks I go to. There's the one near my home in the "gay village," which is always filled to the brim with flirty gay guys; there's the one near the public library, which is kind of a mix; and there's the one downtown, which is visited mostly by lawyers and business men taking a coffee break.

The one I go to most often is downtown. I work as a professor, and after a day of sitting alone in the library working on some writing, it's refreshing to my spirit to go downtown. I like seeing everyone all dressed up. I like hearing their conversations with deal with concerns so far from my own. I like the bustly energy of "downtown" which is so totally unlike the energy of the university.

A lot of people complain about Starbucks, and I understand being frustrated with the feeling that they are taking over. But in many ways it's a very OK company. In my experience, they're for real about welcoming anyone to hang out there, even for long periods of time. They're respectful of the wandering, the confused, and the homeless. They offer a good selection of healthy snack foods, and they're cheerful and encouraging about putting your coffee in ceramic instead of paper. They offer health insurance to their employees.

Today's narrative happens at the library Starbucks, which, as I said, is a real mix. It's kind of close to the University, so there are students, but it's also close to various museum-y things so there are tourists. It's slightly a "see and be seen" crowd, because there's a Tim Horton's right next door, and in some class-distinction-complexity of Canada that I don't quite get yet, it seems that people who identify as "sensible" are faithful to Tim Horton's, though to the untrained eye the two places just seem to offer completely different sorts of things.

I was working at Starbucks, and I had my laptop open. On the other side of the narrow room, there was a weird guy, maybe about 22 years old. At the table next to him, a young couple - maybe like 17 or 18, very quiet.

Some coffee spilled. I looked over, couldn't get the story. Whose coffee was it? Was it an accident? The older guy's laptop was open on his table but it seemed fine. There were some words exchanged, but quietly. It was calm for 5 minutes.

Then angry, louder words. Some taunting: it seemed like the older guy was taunting the younger guy, trying to get something started, and the younger guy wasn't sure what to do. I'm probably just projecting, but it seemed to me like the younger guy would've been just as happy to leave the place and avoid a confrontation but that he also wanted to stand up for himself in front of his girlfriend.

The tension escalated. Everyone could tell a fight was brewing; everyone was kind of looking at them like, guys, just cool it, it's Starbucks. You can't fight here.

Eventually the younger guy started trying to make peace. "It's fine; let's just forget it, OK? Just let it go," he said.

"Good," I thought.

Then wham. The two guys were up, seriously going at it, knocking into the table with the older guy's laptop, which teetered and almost crashed to the floor. They grabbed one another, started careening around. In about one second they were crashing toward me.

I grabbed my laptop and held it to my chest, evidently having some thought that if they were going to crash into me I could put myself between the computer and the floor. I'm not sure.

Finally the staff came over and shouted and called for back-up and shouted some more and made a huge fuss and finally the young couple left and the staff stood over the old guy glaring at him 'til he packed up his stuff and got out.

I learned:

I do not have the necessary qualities for breaking up fights. It's not just that I'm physically not a fighter (though that is true), and it's not that I'm timid (because I'm not); it's just that I don't care enough. These guys were so mad, they'd have steamrolled right over me.

It's not necessarily because I'm a girl that I don't have these qualities. The staff member who came over and broke it up was a girl and she did an awesome job. Those two piped right down.

I seem to care a lot about my laptop.

The Unquiet Conscience

Louis Althusser told us all about the vague guilt we feel when made aware that a policeman is walking behind us. Then, later, he strangled his wife in his sleep.

There is a lesson in that.

I got a note the other day from the Glendale Public Library telling me that I had an overdue book. The odds were in the Glendale Library's favor; I have a psychological block about returning library books on time. But I was pretty sure I had returned that particular book. Library workers sometimes fail to scan books in properly. I know this, because I was once a library worker myself.

I went back to the Glendale Public Library yesterday; I had other (overdue) books to return. At the front desk I registered my protest about the allegedly overdue book. Also, I checked the shelves. It was there, exactly where it should have been, and I brought it up to the front desk, where they checked it in.

Then I asked if I had any fines and I did and I asked if any of them were for the book in question and they were, so the nice library worker removed those fines and I paid for the actually overdue books and went home.

Here's the point:

Having foreseen exactly this course of events, I felt tremendously unquiet. There was no way for any grudging or suspicious authority to satisfy itself that I had not checked this book out, failed to return it, and then by virtue of claiming to have returned it earlier, gotten out of paying the fine.

Let me be clear. I had not done that. Nor did anyone accuse me of having done that. But because I could not prove I had not done that, I felt guilty.

A couple weeks ago I found myself wandering through Rite Aid with a full bag of Doritos that I had purchased at that same Rite Aid a couple of weeks earlier, and that same vague sense of guilt overcame me. Guilt, I guess, for having put myself into a position susceptible to sinister interpretations.

If, one day, one of the obligations of citizenship is not to put oneself in equivocal situations that could give rise to (ultimately unfounded) suspicions, life will be unbearable.