Two Paths Diverge

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

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

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

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

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?

Surprised me to see this billboard in Moscow 

today.  Moscow usually offers surprises of the 

other kind.