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.