Life in Moscow (Idaho)

Three Types

2010-12-04T11:38:00.000-08:00

Generally, idioms like to identify two kinds of people: those who have and those who haven't; those who give and those who take. In video production, it’s: those who have dropped a camera and those who will.

But actually, it seems the world if full of three kinds of people, and the distinction lies not in materialism or temperament but in locomotion: those who are driven by holes, those are driven by emotion, and those who are driven by lines.

Of course, all people feel emotion and all life paths appear to follow lines of one sort or another, but it is the life of the mind that drives action and, in the mind, people usually have modules spinning away, causing them to respond in one way or another to the stimuli they see. Like objects obeying Special Relativity, people's responses to the exact same stimulus differ and depend, unlike in Relativity, not on their speed relative to given event's speed but to whether they are holy, emotional or linear.

Perhaps you can tell, by the order of annotation of these clusters, which one this writer prefers most and least. However, it is important to note that no particular value judgment should be placed on the methods of response to the world, because, as evolution teaches us, what is preferred by the world of today may be selected out tomorrow.

Also, holy people are most numerous. They are the ones driven by what is missing in their life, what they are trying to fill. The love they long for: social acceptance, respect, money - often all tied together in a cluster frequently referred to as the fulfillment of the American Dream.

These people are born with self-named inadequacies that they begin to recognize and chastise early on. These elements then begin to propel forward motion. Because I was told women can't be president, I will graduate from college, enter law school and run for office. Because I was unsuccessful in school, I will acquire so much knowledge outside this institution that no one will be able to reproach me on intelligence.

It is important to note that these distinctions are self-drawn. The people who are driven by what is missing appoint their own course of remedy. Eventually, after enough people form a responsive behavior to something like a lack of a college degree, this behavior may become culturally recognizable. To an extent, for instance, that, if you meet someone in an airport and they begin to appear to know very much about everything, there may be reason to suspect their former scholarly success. Still, this is not a given; it is only a result of the accumulation of enough similar response to personal performance.

It is also important to note that people driven by what they are missing do no occupy a particular portion of the U.S. socioeconomic strata. If anything, they are frequently successful in name and profession. It is only the method through which they pursued this - the impetus behind it - that distinguishes them from the other two kinds of approach to life propulsion.

To allegorize, the holy people are like snails: they carry a load on their back, and it is this load that dictates whether they can go under bridges or turn corners or sit on a leaf.

A completely different approach to locomotion is the emotional approach. These people are the most independent from geography and circumstance, because, to them, the world is made up of moments. Whether they are on a mountain top or on a busy subway, they see clusters of emotional cogency by which they drive their behavior. And by "see," I don't mean literally see. I mean, for instance, that, if you are an emotional propulsionist and are on a mountaintop, what you see perhaps is a photograph based on the mountain top. From it, you are reminded of a picture in a book in which a woman was sitting in a rocking chair next to a window that looked out on a mountain top. You focus on the woman and her elements. Why was she there? Why was there a mountain? Was it story you read? An article?

Whatever it was, your associations are human-based. They quickly go from stolid, scenic picture to involving people, behaviors, solitude - emotional meaning of some sort.

A holy person standing next to the emotional may experience similar associations, but his actions of what to do next will be different and will be based on his need to fill the voids in his state: He may want to take a photo of himself in this spot, to make a memory of the fact that he was indeed hiking today - something he was told was reserved for hip people, on a belonging to which category he is now endeavoring.

Of course, the emotional person may take a picture as well, but he will not be considering the benefits of this action to his self-image, necessarily. And, if he is, he will be questioning his image in relationship to other images he has come across and the questions posed by people's general desire to be photographed in places of note.

The most advantageously positioned person of the bunch would be the linear propulsionist. Linearlists are actually line connectors. They see a mountain top and, if they carry geographical knowledge, relate it to the position of the ravine below and to the group's own position. They may be aware of where North is and how long it may take the group to arrive back at its hike's starting point. This does not mean that linearists have no emotion or do not enjoy scenery or do not think about other people. It only means that their first observations are of a structural kind. And it also means that they are map-drawers. They see a map of the world they are part of and, as a result of this function, they see opportunity and connection. They may observe a building that looks like a post office. They may decide, by its structure, that it must be a federal building and, by its size, the number of employees it may hold. They may also consider what this means for the nature of the city they are in. It is large or small, a bank or courthouse may be in the vicinity. They extrapolate broad, linked mapping from the information immediately available.

While an emotionalist may consider the same building in the light of what it must be like to enter it every day and to work there, the linearist sees it as a central telling point about other aspects of his surroundings.

These people are often envied because they seem to have a magical way of knowing things.

In fact, however, the information they deduce from their environments is logically sequential and would be available to anyone who spent the time to follow the links.

My only point here is that, to some people, the linear mode of comprehension is first in their cognitive apparatus. And to the emotionalists, the human, emotional element is first. And to the holies, the needs of their personal fulfillment are first. All people may dabble in fulfilling personal need - do dabble. All people make structural connections about the world - it's a necessity. And all people consider their own and other's behavioral states - again, a necessity.

The point is only that, in the three different kinds of people that populate the world, one of these modi operandi dominates and emerges as the driving force for action:

To the linearists, because of their instantaneous mapping of surroundings and opportunity, the world if full of connected roads and they need only take a stride down one of them to start gliding. Whether successful or not, they are always active, always trying new things. Seeing opportunities for investments, vacations, relationships, careers. Within a single block of downtown. That or they see no opportunity in particular block and want to move away and map roads elsewhere, for a circumstance they like better.

The holy house-carriers build a world centered around themselves. They map the world, but all roads lead to them and, critically, the roads that do not lead to them are instantly purged or ignored. Like a clam, whose pearl is a product of a quarantined impurity, a holy person's responses and actions are based on coating the pearl. Coating the pearl is critical. Once coated, it needs to then be either kept hidden or carefully displayed as an object of beauty.

Nevertheless, as noted earlier, holy people seem to be highly driven. They seem to enjoy education and hard work. They are frequently immersed in popular culture and are full of interesting information and anecdotes. They may be fashion trend-setters and people's favorite boss. They may not, in other words, as the above description may suggest, be externally damaged or even internally tormented. It is only their drive that is propelled forward by the impurities they wish to coat: the basis for their forward motion - not its end result.

The emotionalists and the linearists, in contrast, can be found in much broader categories of success: from wildly successful, when the roads they mapped were advantageously positioned for their undertaking or when their artistic nature found ready outlet in a circumstance poised to take it on. But also, linearists and emotionalists, because they are less driven by popular ideas of success, can be wanderers, adventurers, writers and everyday people whose mode of propulsion finds circuitous routes in familiar spots and whose sometimes rigged view of the world creates a feeling of claustrophobia whose circumstances they do not appear to be able to alter.

So there is no best way to go forward in life, in the end. And indeed if there were, we would not have the choice to choose, since "Nature" would win here with its predispositions, upbringing and genetic factors.

In the end, everyone, like a normal mortal, takes one step at a time, but, like marionettes that is each wound up by a different clock, we function in clustering tendencies: some coat, some feel and some map. Meanwhile, the carries of each tendency look around to those of others and secretly wish to extend a hand into their world, imagining that a change will bring unimagined opportunities. Nature, however, knows better and sticks to consistency within the organism. Perhaps unable to relish modulation or perhaps too wise to do so, it looks forward, instead, to the oscillating patterns of the grander process, in which Selection washes waves of statistical members into a larger human form.

American Watermelon

2010-07-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

In Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love, during the protagonist's first overseas stop in Italy, she mentions a friend, an Italian, whose American wife had apparently written on the walls of their apartment some angry profanity and accusations in Italian, once during a fight. Julio says that, had his wife truly been free and expressive, she would have written in her native language, in English, following the passion of her rage. Writing in Italian would have given her pause - time for translation. All Americans are like this, diagnoses Julio in Gilbert's words: "A savage people." Buttoned up and repressed at all times except when truly uncorked, and therefore, in the latter moments, unsafe and potentially lethal.

Gilbert's memoir is light and sunny despite such insight. Like the characters in the scene, who are eating a "pleasant dinner" at the time of Julio's opinion, her story moves along lightly, as if gliding on soft waves of a sea not particularly in any hurry.

She, unlike the American stereotype her narrator has just endorsed, is not shrinking or defensive. She just tells it and moves away. Offering a portrait of quite another kind of American.

We do have to note that Gilbert and her narrator are the sole originators of the negative idea to begin with, and so they both have the luxury of quiet removal, there being truly no agents to contend with. Still, many writers who take on the ideas of other people, whether hypothetical or reported, are not as smooth as she is and are not able to offer an antidote to the idea they present even as they are presenting it.

Yet there is something lasting about the repressed-American story in Gilbert's memoir. While still in Italy, her narrator reports on many other Italian tendencies that clash with the ways overworked, guild-ridden Americans would respond to life.

Something of the latent feeling of these narratives pinned itself on me the afternoon I read about them, when I returned from the grocery store carrying a 20-lb watermelon under my arm.

The watermelon was mushy, and I had been so eager to bite into its crispy wateriness that I WAS disappointed and, given that I am a little bit of an American, the thought that I could - maybe should - return this watermelon occurred to me. I could, couldn't I? I had the receipt.

Returning food to the grocery store is organically foreign to me. I think I HAVE done it once, under pressure of people who'd urged me to exercise my American right to perfect food, but I have only done it once, and the fact that I even had the thought with this watermelon felt contrived. As if the thought had been produced in a far off place and only delivered to me superficially, landing on the top of my head, on top of my hair, like an oversized cloth stamp, and just sitting there, tottering.

As it was, I was not going to take the watermelon back. I wrapped up what I had not eaten or spit out, and put in the refrigerator, as if I were putting a baby in its crib, thinking about how much more energy there would be in returning a food like this than in eating and enjoying whatever parts of it were healthy. It isn't anybody's fault, after all, that the watermelon was mushy. If I had picked it out from the field in which it had grown and it was overripe, would I return it back to the soil? "I would like my money back, soil."

And yet our economy endorses - encourages - this kind of nonsensical sense of entitlement on the part of the consumer. Of course with certain commercial items, return is reasonable and necessary: clothing that is damaged, a car that does not work. But to return a watermelon and get your five dollars back actually probably costs sixty dollars to the whole system together. There is the time you spent buying the watermelon that you will never get back. There is the fact that you wanted a watermelon two hours ago and now have not had one yet still and have spent additional time thinking about how you are entitled to perfect watermelons and have somehow been swindled. There is the time of all the store employees and of the store itself: the cost of the watermelon, its transport, storage and display. And there is the sheer fact that you will be throwing away something on which, even as you toss it, you are expending additional needless energy.

All because, as Julio might put it, you were too overworked and emotionally undernourished to take from the earth what it happened to have given you. In our demand for perfection - in watermelon, in customer service, in ourselves - we deplete and deplete the soil of our life and culture. That patch of earth where the bad watermelon came from has now cost several patches. You have taken an overripe watermelon, which has, say, half the value of a perfectly ripe one, and have expounded its liability. Your demand on its perfection, your disposal of it, return of it to the store, time spent dealing with and transporting it, has now built a small credit on the soil that it came from.

And it is because of this blindness that American life is expensive, that Americans are in debt. If every patch of soil that has a small foible on it costs ten healthy patches, this is life on credit. Life on profligacy.

I cannot say why this idea of American attitudes takes me me so directly to Julio's repressed-American portrait. I only know that there is some deep connection between the tendency to repress anger and other feelings and the tendency to expound entitlement. Because I cannot tell my wife how I really feel, you, my real-estate agent, have to pamper me today. Because my child gets Cs and I can't say anything negative about it, you, my shoe salesman, will put up with every caprice about how the color black is just not the right shade on this one either. Because I am hurting, a watermelon will go back. Back and not back, for it is lost forever in the costs absorbed by my diminishing ego.

On the Bus

2010-07-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

I once heard a man say that he'd fallen in love with a woman on a bus. A woman he'd never talked to and maybe not seen completely. But something about her pose and her clothing made him fantasize about her. And, he added, it was these little love affairs, the ones that were purely ephemeral, that were the most poignant in his life.

This makes sense, and I think many of us understand it intuitively. Who hasn't fantasized about Mr. Darcy?

Women in suits on buses I think is also the reason many visual and storytelling artists go into their trade. I for instance, though only on the cusp of artistry in my video work, am drawn to documenting and talking and pointing cameras at people, because I want all their stories. I want the woman on the bus and the guy behind her and the mom with the little kid that's going to get whooped pretty soon, each in a little tiny book with hard covers, captured and put away on a shelf for posterity.

There is such an activity, of course. It's called fiction writing.

Writers generalize forms just as the man I heard tell the bus story did. But they generalize expansively and imaginatively. And correctly. They take the woman prototype AND the reasons random men on buses might be attracted to her AND the reasons some particular man might be - and they qualify her. They make her into a person but also into a generality. Just in the way my little hard-cover book would. Then writers put bunches of these prototypical but individualistic characters together in a collection and put life around them, just as a painting blocks its main subjects and then builds around. Then writers fill in blank after blank. They begin with a focus: someone sitting at a table telling someone else they don't know where their daughter has gone to - and then build detail upon detail. Until the blocking becomes clear. And the scenery. And, just as they seem to really get going and begin refining, the last clarifying step just snaps together. Like those awkward children's puzzles that are all strings and wobblies until you press something just right and the whole thing locks together into a cube or a ladder or something else blocky.

Then the story is done and it is over. You, the reader, were shown, bit by bit by bit, the whole picture. And as you were waiting for a similarly progressive process to go over the bits and now put bows on them, bows and all are slapped on top of the picture, finishing it in one fell swoop and pulling the curtain besides.

I like to think that, in its own way, video production can have a similar effect.

Of course, it has the advantage - and the challenge - of real people to contend with and, while a single look on a person's face can tell as much as would take special care by a writer to convey, yet the producer is at the mercy of greater uncertainty and much less control.

Music goes a long way in sculpting video projects to a focused point, and certainly the music removes video and its offshoots from the written word. Cameras and looks on faces is one thing, but add music and now you really cannot compare the media. You have to separate them and not attempt an overlap, no matter how many movies are produced from books. Perhaps the Hollywood producers who work on book-to-movie projects will have something to say about whether a movie is anything like a book or whether it is only, as its credits say, "based on" one and nothing else.

Still, auteurs of all sorts draw to the women on the buses and the men in the deserts and the people in kitchens like moths to a lantern. These are the focal points of our attraction. Around their potential we see the house of cards that our vision spins. I will start with music under and fade up from black. And then she will look up and she won't say anything. Then we will cut to a wide shot of a building with a car in front. Not that car. A white, long, skinny one. And then the music will change.

The music will change and grow and end. And I will wrap up and put the whole thing in a little book and shelve it.

The Writer God

2010-06-12T23:58:00.001-07:00

As a secular person, I feel comfortable personifying god in almost any endeavor.

Within literature particularly, where writers have to know everything about human character and behavior that psychologists and neuroscientists are now starting to uncover through quite another effort, the presence of that something that some of us have and that we as a culture long for is especially vivid.

Why should James Joyce be compelled to say that Gabriel had to fix “his cuffs and the bows of his tie” after his jovial comment is rebuffed by the young, poor housemade to which it was offered ? (The Dead ) Why should Tolstoy know how to make an army commander press his two fingers "more and more rigidly to his cap," when confronted with having to justify himself to a superior? (War and Peace. Book 2 Chapter 1.) And why do we know just what they mean?

Today, science has a lot to tell us about why people fix cuffs and holds caps, and the simple answer to how writers who are not mind scientists know what is necessary for the building of frequently complete and believable characters, is that they are intuitive psychologists.

And we in their readership are to be intuitive readers. From general experience, we are to interpret the information we are given correctly. We are not to think, for instance, that the commander is holding his cap because it makes him think of this daughter. We, like the writers, are to know that this action means the commander is nervous or stressed.

We are all intuitive psychologists. But the most direct and interesting distillation between physical reality and its interpretation happens at the level of the writer. Between the writer and god. Between him and the biochemistry and neurocircuitry that runs us and that, at present at least, is likely to be so complex that it cannot be fully quantified in an equation.

Unless the equation is made of words that beget images that tell stories and result in experience.

Perhaps Einstein would say that the best science is the kind you experience. Or, if he wouldn't, perhaps our next inspired genius should.

Bang! Bang!

2010-04-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

In the story by Flannery O’Connor The Life you Save May be Your Own, a young drifter abducts a woman he has recently married to leave her at a gas station and drive away with her mother’s car, a gift for their wedding.

As he drives away, he reads a sign that says, “Drive carefully. The Life you save may be your own.”

He is among the class of citizens now for whom this sign was written. From Man with no Automobile, to Man with Automobile, whose intended philanthropy toward other lives by driving well is rewarded with a reminder that it may be himself, in the end, that he saves.

This ending is so multifaceted and poignant, because, despite clearly reaping the benefits of a message meant for conscientious citizens, of which he is not one, yet still, even as a scoundrel, he is human enough to feel entitled to the gratification. And we feel human enough, as readers, to grant him the gift.

The “moment of grace” O’Connor talks about as grounding all of her stories, is present here in the last sentiment. Among all his strengths and connivings, Tom Shiftlet, is weak enough to need to feel endorsement and pride. And it is the ironic twist that brings this feeling about by means of the car he has just stolen from a weak old woman and her weaker daughter.

There are layers upon layers here. Like a mound of gradient planes. There is a victim and a predator, yes. But there is also heart and heartache. There is knowing trickery and the surprise of accidental elation. Just as she is at the mercy of his scheme, he is at the mercy of the sign that puts him in his place even as it presents him with the illusion of his own importance.

Like the fake story that wins you the Honors of Honesty contest, Tom Shiftlet uses a car that isn’t his to reap a reward that isn’t his. A reward that isn’t his but for which there is a spot in his character nevertheless. The story seems to say that perhaps we could all be scoundrels if we had the characteristics this man has and certainly, even scoundrels need affirmation that they are honorable.

National fables and cinema illustrate the way in which a culture as a whole upholds the tenets of moral goodness despite the fact that many of its citizens must necessarily be engaged in work that is less pure. No one likes a movie in which the scoundrel wins. Unless the scoundrel is in fact the good guy and only giving those who prefer to use their skills for evil a taste of their own superior medicine. But, basically, both the guy who just swindled an old woman out of her life’s savings for a not-so-very-good car and the man who saved his neighbor’s child from drowning today want the good guy in the movie to win.

And so does Tom Shiftlet. He knows what a good guy is and now, thanks to his new automobile, he can feel like one. Never mind the means to that end. There must be a reference to this too, in the Psychology 101 book on my desk, but righteousness is ever righteous. Self-serving, self-amplifying righteousness sticks to us like a candy stick and we collect it as we go along a road down which the acts of cruelty we perform are miraged over with signs that say “Thank you for your generous donation. You are he who makes a difference in the higher orders.”

* * *

Some day in the near distant future, humans will have the opportunity to control their own population dynamics scientifically. Not only physiologically but socially. There will be a movement, a concerted, centralized effort to strive for future generations of people who are capable of fulfilling their entire potential. People who are the perfect scoundrel or the perfect angel and have no reservations or no drive to be a little more one or less of the other. People on whom the “Life You Save” sign will be lost. Then, literature will become boring and disappear next to its own moment of grace. But we won’t know it.

----------------------

Works

O'Connor, Flannery. "The Life You Save May be Your Own." var. collections

O'Connor, Flannery. "On Her Own Work." Mystery and Manners. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Noonday. 1969 (1957). 118.

Like Sarah

2010-01-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

It feels a little bit like that moment when you realize you have been wasting your time talking to an unworthy partner to venture on a comment about Sarah Palin, but a recent encounter in an elevator made me realize something about her that perhaps merits attention.

The encounter was between me and a short, thin man who worked at the resort that the elevator was part of. He took one look at me with my fluffy bangs, bun and glasses and said: "I thought you were Sarah Palin."

Now, there are many reasons why I can receive this message in a mixed way. I chose to be grateful and nod smilingly at the man, who then followed his first comment with something to the effect of: "I just stood in line to see her in [insert small Idaho town] last weekend.”

It wasn't right away after this incident that I realized why the small, middle-aged man who would have never been friends with Sarah Palin was enamored with her, in her public-figure status today.

At home, after having straightened out my hair and removed the impromptu, Travel bun, I thought about him again and it struck me that she is the cheerleader whom he could never get close to in high school. Now, suddenly, she is inviting him to come see her, to shake her hand, to talk to her. She is winking at him on TV, speaking his language on issues of patriotism and hunting. He loves her. He loved her in high school.

Today, he and others like him - women, too - are taken aback, perhaps, by the fact that, that stereotypical beautiful girl they could not get close to, socially, is, firstly, inviting, and secondly, of their political and social stance.

I mean to imply that this is all subconscious. Nobody actually thinks that he or she is attracted to a political figure because he could not be friends with the popular crowd in high school. But what else is it when a not-very-well-informed, good-looking, well-dressed woman speaks both the language of high school politics ("ra-ra! yes, yes! let's go! team!") and a colloquial, rural, modern politicism that, from the point of view of pure discourse, smacks of intellectual regression more than of progress?

To whom would such a speaker appeal if not to those who would have wanted to know her when they were young and hoped that she was not the unapproachable figure she appeared?

Sarah Palin is a social comrade-come-true for all Americans who felt intimidated by looks and intellect in high school. I don't have access to the numbers, but my personal memory suggests something like "half," as to the percentage of the population likely to have been affected in this way.

So half of Americans within a certain mid-life age range are candidates for the kind of friendship that Palin's folksy, warm style invites. Remember me?, she says. You always wanted to know me. Well now you can. And I'm not even scary. I'll run for student-body president, yes, but I won't be intimidating with any information that you don't also know or with any intellectual prowess that might cower you. I am your equal, the way you always wanted me to be.

It's heaven.
It's the secret, unearthed dream of the repressed American heart. The timid, the hardworking, the underappreciated person who never expected to be appreciated. Never expected to be approached by anyone who spoke his language but was stronger, looked into his eyes but was more beautiful, extended a hand in a stylish suit.

It sounds as if I am deprecating a certain kind of human, a certain kind of American. I am not.

I am noting a possible psychological basis for the attraction Palin has generated.
She is good-looking, yes, but so are most women in pictures and posters.
She, instead of being just a model, is the living cheerleader from the standard, American high school, come to life in full, female form and speaking like a wind-up doll all the American-cheerleader-all-grown-up expositions we would expect to hear.

She is irreverent, she is ill-read, she is confident. She is a natural. She could be sold by Mattel.

I don't have a personal reaction to Sarah Palin. I don't dislike her. I don't think she is a malicious, invidious confectioner, out to undermine regular American politics. On the contrary. She is a very natural result of the political and social environment in this country, where far fewer than half of all students graduate from college, where chess and surgery are considered occupations only for the uber-smart and where, as a result, a very large class of under-confident workers and citizens thrives on the hope that one day the world will come to it instead of expecting the never-ending and unreasonable improvements of self and situation that are, in some catalyzing conclusion, to constitute the ubiquitous "American dream".

That moment arrives on the screen for many people, when Sarah Palin smiles and winks and fights the battles with the other student-body presidents that are intellectual and well-spoken. She lets 'em have it - her way. She speaks for everyone. She is not afraid to be colloquial. She is proud of who she is. AND - she is good looking! The personal fantasy of conquest for that half of American high schoolers who didn't want to have anything to do with smart and popular people if they were going to be deriding and all mighty. Well now they don't have to choose. Looks, confidence and poise are packaged in an unthreatening, shiny, matte package that manages to dazzle without overwhelming and to win battles without ever engaging in them. In a league of her own, with an agenda of her own, gaining everyone's attention, speaking no one's language, answering to a higher power and to no one else, unapologetic, proud. And looking at you.
Kid.

We can't blame anybody. Not even John McCain. It's part of the mix. Palin's popularity would come out as a positive quotient from the wiggles of some complicated equation about whether or not this type of personality, wielded in this way, would appeal to a certain percentage of the American population. It would be inevitable and, again, positive in value.

So here she is. Love her or hate her. Or just accept her. Like the Barbie doll you never really wanted to buy your kids but always did buy. She's there, she's shiny and we will have her!

Two Paths Diverge

2009-12-08T20:41:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it is uncharacteristic not to want to be younger, but, for me, younger means twenty-something, and twenty-something means the re-entry of questions of self.

It is a cliche, of course, to bring up self-fulfillment, but it does seem, by and large, that people who have personality also have traits. Skills, tendencies. Directions in which they would lean if they were left to their personal whims and desires. They would travel, or do nothing or bask in the sun, or seek out the snow or be around lots of children or hide from children. There are predisposition. There is at least a portion of nature in our nature-nurture construct.

With these predisposition comes a responsibility to them. They are you, and you have a responsibility to yourself. That is how we prefer to phrase it.

So much of human disappointment begins there. You are four and you love the ball but you can't quite kick it as you'd like to. You are 11 and long to be outside, but there is no one to go with. You are seventeen and - well, what manner of achievement do you not fall short of accomplishing. Fall short of and yet excel at. You're better than ever at reading, writing, understanding, communicating, meeting greeting and studying. You can kick a ball perhaps as well as new pro. You can go outside any time. And yet these are but the precursors of what is to come. So you think. Life will only get better, you will only get stronger and more proficient.

Perhaps.

There seems to be, divided in us, the need to fulfill our tendencies and the need to acquire recognition for them. The functions are apparently independent of each other, because we are drawn as strongly to recognition for random achievements as to that for accomplishments of our bona-fide pallet. To win a place on the debate team (when you hate to debate) and to win a hard game at football (when you love football) draw similar reactions from parents and supporters: pride, camaraderie, satisfaction. It is an addicting sensation to please others, and frequently while we are still in high school, we begin to seek out accomplishments that will generate this effect. We are as likely to stay on the Debate Team as in football, if we receive enough recognition for it.

The supporting network that surrounds people of any age is prone to praise of the person in question. Everyone likes to be supportive. What is wrong with patting someone on the back? Why not congratulate his law-school entrance efforts? Why not exalt a master's degree, a marriage, a pregnancy?

And yet, because the approval we receive from others is so important to us, this sometimes subtle but omnipresent support and, more importantly, our understanding of the conditions under which it is likely to be granted, begins to lead us as frequently into behavioral patterns that focus only on the end result and abandon consideration for the subject matter the patterns engage.

So, if book publishing is really important in someone's world -- his parents, friends or community value this above other tracks of activity -- it is as likely that this person, given any exposure at all to the field, will gravitate toward it not out of personal affiliation necessarily but because of the approval the act is likely to generate.

This involves several problems. First of all, it arises out of a chasing after an end result instead of a following of a process. This is negative only because end results are nothing more than processes in the future, stationed at the tail end of a previous process. And to chase the process that comes after the one just head is sort of...blind. No one can walk the road of the adjacent hill until he gets there and should be naturally preoccupied with his current surroundings. But so frequently, the present surroundings are overlooked. "I'll just do this for a few years until I can move to Montana and become a school teacher." Whatever "this" is, I'm willing to bet it is valued by the person's immediate circle of support. It may be laudable, prestigious, lucrative. The future, in this line of thinking, holds two main events: the closer event of praise and approval from family and friends and the distant event of the ability to pursue the course of action that is more closely associated with one's personality once the person has been vindicated for doing "the right thing" for long enough.

The trouble is that we become addicted to the praise. Some lucky people are able to muster the praise they need out of performing the activity(ies) they love. Someone is a doll maker and everyone loves him. He is the best doll-maker in France. Someone is a lawyer, and she is the best lawyer in Toronto. Such people, if they are personally built for the work they perform, have combined two needs that naturally come bound in us: the need to kick a ball high and have our mom approve of this action.

Throughout our lives and, as I have tried to suggest, sometimes quite early in adulthood, we begin to have to choose between approval and action. Not every action garners the same kind of approval, and it is interesting that we do not discriminate when it comes to praise: we'll take it no matter why it is given. How do gangs work so well. Someone told me once that a gang is just a family. I certainly see that. As a family it has rules and strict approval and disapproval of actions. Though gang activities may sometimes be against the law in the society within which a group thrives, they are not against the law inside the gang. There, approbation for activity not otherwise approved rules, and the members of the gang follow those rules instead of the ones of the city or state that it lives in. Those rules are the guideposts by which we acquire respect, approbation and praise within gangs and, consequently, those are the rules that we follow, because our interest in approval and inclusion in a social circle is stronger than many other needs of self-placement or -development.

And therein lies the next problem: we do not focus very much on marrying the praise we are to get with an action that is self-actualizing or personally laudable. We want the praise and raise the money for it in any way we can. Thereby, we can abandon the interests that we thought we would develop and pursue in young adulthood. The need for approval pulls us away from the need to self-actualize. And still, the latter lies heaving, usually buried, stifled and slowly leaking out a message of S.O.S.

Sometime around Middle Life, the leak has created enough of a pool to require attention, and people sometimes stop to gather it up and empty it out. Sometimes, they open the floodgates to the leak and change careers, get married or divorced, more to or from an exotic place and generally start over.

But always, there is the need of approval to consider. Only at such times for such people, the approval sought is that mostly of the person himself. We, as our own first and personal audience member are also part of the approving network, and our weight leans in more and more with time. Others have a much greater influence on the young in matters of self-opinion and self-worth than they do on a 40 year old.

And so, through the sheer force of the passage of time and the change in personal psychology that it brings in individuals, we are able to become less dependent if not on praise than at least on the praise of others.

It is the doom of many young people, however, to be bound in this inextricable, human way to what others may like or approve of. Combined with the rigid catharsis of society, in which certain achievements are bound to be valued more than others, this model of life, love and happiness spirals many into the centers of culturally important activities that leave them personally devoid.

Perhaps one day, the combination of being happily engaged in your life's work while generating the much richer praise that this is likely to elicit will become so advantageous that no one will give up one for the other, or mix and match the ratios in ever turbulent and hopeless effect.

Maybe one day we will learn how to pull optimal potential from ourselves and from others, and will only reward achievements that are also personally valuable to the rewarded. Then I only wonder what sort of consensual family circles there might be and what economies of expanded productivity and enthusiasm. Until then, we just stand by, on as tall a hill as we each can find, and admire those few who have merged personal potential with societal recognition. They are the bright stars in the sky. I think we even call them that.

I Listen to NPR

2009-09-16T21:49:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, when iPods were still new and the only people who had them were those who also had square-rimmed glasses and a job in an undefined, new hip part of commerce, a coworker wanted to tell me about another coworker she had. And she didn't know how to hone him down for me until she thought of her solution: "He has an iPod," she said.

Having an iPod meant something then, and it WAS a good way to describe the character of a person. Kind of like saying, "He lives in the country," or "He has a Harley." Stereotype-driven but still telling.

Today, iPods are so common that having one means nothing short of than that you are probably under 80 years of age. Probably.

Still, people insist on describing themselves to others in ways that elude information.

Today, I had someone say to me, by way of elucidating his character, that he listens to NPR.

"I listen to NPR," he said.

It is true that I, too, listen to NPR, but what does that mean?

For one thing, I don't listen to NPR all the time, 24 hours a day. I listen sometimes, in the morning, when I am hungry for news. Sometimes I listen to my NPR station for classical music picks, just to be surprised by something new. Sometimes I listen on my way back from work. A lot of times Fresh Air is on then.

But saying that I listen to NPR means nothing more than saying that I listen to some other station or to the radio in general or even just that I listen to people talking and reporting, even if they're not on the radio.

The difference between my listening to NPR, I thought, and someone else listening is so enormous that saying we both do so suggests no guaranteed similarity between us at all.

This person who announced his listenership, for instance, saw it upon himself to make other pronouncements about his character. He is responsible. He works hard. He likes corn. Well, for one thing, I would never make a list of my character points to present to a friend or acquaintance. I would not say I am responsible and a great tennis player, as a way of self-introduction. I may say so in conversation, if topics veered that way, but I would not recite qualities like a grocery list. So a person who recites and listens to NPR is a very different sort of person from the one who maybe does not recite and also listens.

Very different. A story might make me put more gas in my car than I usually would. It might change my mood or make me want to wash my windshield with those self-serve rubber squeegees.

It might make someone else take notes and register to vote or call his mother. It might make someone reconsider his career choice, think hard about daycare or hair color or aging. The possibilities span the gamut.

So really, New Friend, a statement that you think is representative of a certain set of qualities in you is really not representative unless you take the time to annotate the qualities you think it stands for and why they may be thus held. In that respect, if you had annotated, we would at least have in common the insight that a simple pronouncement cannot mean what is implied by its hidden significance unless properly unpacked. As it is, all I gain from what you've said is that you have little discretion in gauging the tiny fractures in the language you claim to use to your advantage.

Lentil Windows

2009-08-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

I tried to look up "the window effect" in my Psych 105 psychology textbook, but I couldn't find it.

I experienced the window effect a few nights ago, when I was driving back from a wonderful night with friends at the world-renown lentil festival in Pullman, WA. Pullman is the lentil capital of the world (true) and there, in the middle of downtown, by the library, the City of Pullman puts up a giant vat full of lentil chili, and people line up to get a Styrofoam cupful or two.

Sometimes it is spicy, sometimes it is mild. This time, it was spicy and very good.

My friends and I work for the same organization, and our company had a booth at the festival, festivals being essentially times when every business, instead of keeping house at its regularly leased venue, brings out all its pots and pans, banners and whistles, flyers and representatives out into the street for more direct contact with the friends and neighbors that are the town's citizens.

In a town of 20-something thousand, you'd think there would either be nobody on the streets of the Festival, or it would look really full. And it always looks really full.

People drink beer, buy cotton candy, wait for lentil cups and meet and greet. We three friends were also meeting and greeting but mostly we were interested in meeting each other later, after our shift at the booth, at the beer garden. We sat and talked about men and life and friendship. Sick mothers and boyfriends who leave you and people who got away. Age and youth and wanting more and having less. We asked questions about personality types it is hard to ignore or admire, about success and failure, karma and just plain luck.

After beer, we had coffee. Then, half an hour before midnight, we could each safely drive home.

It was at the end of this summer evening, during which there were no mosquitoes, that I drove by student-housing building on a university campus. It was an old, romantic-style building. Large and square, with lots of windows on its straight, forward-looking side. Only some of the windows were lit, but from those windows at that hour for me, shone the feeling that I am sure someone is researching right now if it has not yet been identified: Inside-window-envy-from-outside. Do not think voyeurism. Nothing to do with the people inside. Just the windows themselves with the, promise of a cozy indoors, are the subject of the envy.

The mystery behind this envy, and the reason I am positive it is a phenomenon, is because it happens to those who have no reason to possess it.

For instance, if I walk out of my apartment right now and go out onto the street and look up at the window, I will get Inside-window-envy-from-outside. I will think: Who is the lucky person who gets to live in that cozy place behind the trees atop a tidy downtown business? And the fact that it is I who lives here will make no difference to my envy, because the envy only exists when I am outside looking in and, consequently, is only able to be alleviated there. But it cannot be alleviated while I am outside, since i cannot from that standpoint, satisfy the criteria necessary for its subjugation. Namely, occupation of said cozy window and its cozy laptop seat on the inside, while I am still out on the sidewalk.

Something like Schrodinger's-cat experiment come true would be able to satisfy Inside Window (for short). But, outside the realm of the subatomic, the principles of physical simultaneity do not apply. At least so far.

Still, there is perhaps a sort of leakage from one domain to another, an ability for presence to stretch from outside to in and in to out for the same person, because, for instance, though I do not have inside-window-envy-from-outside right now, while I occupy the inside seat, I could have it if I look at a picture like the kind I will post along with the entry. That way, I get inside-window-envy while at the same time occupying the kind of seat that would inspire it.

In this way, I beat the impermeable paradox of not being able to both envy and occupy enviable seat at the same time, in a circuitous, trick-nature kind of way. I don't really like it but it is the only option for partially alleviating the window-envy so prominent and immediate for those who understand about cozily light windows in summer. Or in any season.

Part of the reason why these windows are so inspiring is because, regardless of what actually happens within them (which we usually don't know), they are always projected upon as holding greater deeds and bigger thoughts than could ever possibly happen in any window you were to be lucky enough to be within. A night-light residential window in a tallish residential building unequivocally suggests learning, studying, higher thinking, writing, the discovery of mysteries and acquisition of epiphanies. For this reason, the window envy builds up in the first place. If we were inspired to think, upon seeing a midsummer night's window, that inside is someone banal, thinking about how the chicken was on sale today and that tomorrow is meant for really getting the laundry stains out of the laundry, we may not feel an attraction of admiration. Inevitably, however, what we project instead is that, if someone is tucked away in a cozy building somewhere, they have bigger problems to solve and higher states to enter than the mere prosaic existence that we may put upon the very same person if we were to see him standing at the bus stop just below.

Such is the unfair story of the light window. It is like Homer's sirens, forever beckoning and seducing, with only empty hands once we succumb enough to come closer, to step inside, at which point the window ceases to be outside, romantic window and becomes a space of furniture and chores that we have to navigate in a constructive manner before it is 10 o'clock.

The window lies and promises one thing while delivering another. While on the outside, you have visions of grandeur. If ever you have a chance to join the ranks of inhabitant, it becomes an apartment. Maybe friendly, maybe functional, certainly home, but just an apartment. And it is only through the mercy of the magic that transforms us from outside-envy-dreamer to inside-busy-bee that we are spared from feeling the paradoxical loss.

Katie Thursdays

2009-08-21T00:12:00.001-07:00

A long time ago, there was a Thursday afternoon when I was in the school library, free from class but honorably employed. The day had gone well in my sixth-grade consciousness and, later, a friend of mine would come see me in the library. A friend who liked me and whom I liked. Katie was bright, outgoing and pretty. She was one of my best friends, because of her quick mind and friendliness, and she was going to come see me in the library, where I was independently exploring content for a presentation on the history of the American holiday Halloween.

It was a great Thursday, and I remember thinking then that, as a matter of fact, several of the previous Thursdays had been pretty good, too. Tomorrow is Friday. You are a successful and active 12-year-old with valuable friends and a library. Thursdays were good, and someone, subconsciously, I stuck to this perception, perhaps every Thursday since that one looking for the special and excellent qualities of the weekday, beneath my now-adult understanding that it is just like every other day.

But besides the sobering superficial comprehension of days of the week, there has also been a dulling of the joy of Thursday through the diminution of the factors that initially made it great. There is less success now in every week, it would seem. Or at least, less internal celebration of the success experienced. There are no such solid, immovable friends, on whose solicitude and admiration you could solidly count. And there is very little magical anymore about a library. I know, this latter is sad from any perspective.

The one thing Thursdays still hold is their iron relationship to Friday and to the weekend.

And yet, somehow, the fact that Friday is coming means very little of anything positive or suggesting freedom. At least to me. Certainly, I will get to sleep in. Or will I? Sometimes, I do not. Sometimes, I have social engagements like going to the farmer's market with friends or calling someone at 9 to arrange something for later in the day, that makes me, even if I don't set the alarm wake up earlier than I would have thought would have been necessary for my sleeplessness recuperation from the week prior.

Still, at least there is no alarm and I *am* free to do with my time as I wish.

But what is it about time that is yours that is somehow still filled with musts and shoulds and I'm-still-late-and-behind-with-these-projects? Almost exactly as if you were still at work. Except now the responsibility is to yourself. For some of us, though, responsibilities at work do feel as if they are for ourselves. For our peace of mind, for our sense of productivity, for our showing off to colleagues, for our purpose of advancement. Emotions that also dominate when you are taken up by ambition to rearrange the kitchen or to buy new mirrors and reshelf the bookshelf: Someone will see. You will be a tidier person. Your mother will like it. You will appreciate yourself as the good housekeeper and apartment-inhabitant that you always wanted to be.

So Thursdays aren't so very exciting any more. Not only is the sparkle of a day close to the end of a productive and invigorating week fizzled from childhood slowly, like the glow of your lovely skin, but the perennial elements that are supposed to be permanent throughout life, like taxes and your parents' love, do not mean as much. The fact that Friday follows Thursday and Saturday and Sunday follow Friday begins to feel like something you *should* be excited about. A notion of whose intellectual validity you are convinced but which does not stir you with the happiness that its recipe predicts.

And so, on this Thursday, when I came very close to not even writing, let alone populating the new bookshelf and sorting the old dresser for a re-make, I feel that I have once again disappointed those gods who count on the value of Thursdays to be able to spread happiness to humans. I have disappointed them in taking a promising day, staying up too late, making a mess instead of a clean-up and not being able to take the picture of Katie (of Katie's 6th-grade photo) that I wanted to attach to this entry. Tomorrow, or when I write next, if the theme permits the post, I will oblige.

Defining the Blog

2009-08-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

This blog should be more appropriately named "Psychology in Moscow," or even "Psychology out of Moscow," because, while I am not a psychologist, I want to focus on observations of and about human behavior and emotion and on research within psychology, neuroscience and connected fields.

In the spirit of Nora Ephron's latest movie, Julie and Julia (screenplay by), I will commit to writing twice every week.

Everything from why people on a dating site can't find each other even though men's and women's profiles are almost identical - laid-back girl / guy, love the outdoors, someone to share my life with - to a description of fundamental attribution error (psychology) and mitigated speech (linguistics.) May even discuss more scientific topics as my confidence builds.

I love good literature, because I think it is filled with all the pith that science puts in our nature but cannot display in ways outside of the arts.

Contrary to what one may think given above, I am not a great reader and when I do read today, I tend to be attracted to nonfiction books like Brian Boyd's On The Origin of Stories or Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Outliers is where I heard about mitigated speech. Apparently, not saying what we mean, while useful sometimes, is not so helpful to co-pilots trying to warn pilots of danger.

Brian Boyd's book I've only just begun, but it promises to take me just where I want to go: deep inside stories and into the reasons they work so well to bundle life and present it to readers in true consumerist style. One of the favorite passages I have come across recently is from Eudora Welty's story "Why I Live at the P.O. ," where the narrator, a woman, has been accused by her sister of secretly disliking her grandfather's beard. The narrator is talking to her grandfather, in the room with them, and has also just served everyone chicken for dinner. "Papa-Daddy," she says, "You know I wouldn't any more want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. It was the farthest thing from my mind! Stella-Rondo sat there and made that up while she was eating breast of chicken."

It's best to read the story from the start to really understand this passage, but the character of the narrator is critically being defined here. She is innocent and obtuse and charming. Harnessed under the protection of her similarly positioned family. But we can see that she is the star. Spunky and transparent, she will let us see all her folly while pointing out others'. She is the perfect narrator.

Perhaps it is stories that I should talk about.

I imagine a mix of science, psychology and fiction is what will congeal in the end.

So long for now. Don't plagiarize.

Don't Believe in God?

2009-04-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

Surprised me to see this billboard in Moscow

today. Moscow usually offers surprises of the

other kind.