The Emperor's New Clothes

Museum Bear

2012-02-12T07:43:00.001-06:00

California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

photo by Joanna Key

Adjutant Stork

2012-01-10T15:36:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Two Deer in a Green World

2012-01-03T21:05:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

X-mas at the Herpetarium

2011-12-25T13:44:00.001-06:00

drawing by Joanna Key

Coyote and Snowflakes

2011-12-20T08:50:00.000-06:00

drawing/collage by Joanna Key

Dog Star

2011-11-25T23:14:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Three and a Half Turkeys

2011-10-28T15:54:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

The World According to Carp

2011-09-25T19:26:00.013-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

The carp is known to be a tireless upstream swimmer that can even jump up a waterfall. So once a year Japanese parents will hang a line of carp wind socks outside their houses, one for each son, hoping their children will grow up to be tough like the carp and never give up.

Some kinds of carp are known for their eye-catching patterns and colors. These carp, called Koi, are raised as ornamental garden pond fish, specially bred like show dogs, fed color-enhancing foods, and kept in special water to create their unique colors and patterns: orange, gray, blue, calico like cats, turquoise with red fins and tail, an all-green metallic sheen, golden pine needles, sparkly iridescent scales, white with red head patches, red marks with black shadows, rings like a coral snake, yellow-and-black stripes like a road barrier.

But then there is the Silver Carp. Hearing the name, you might picture a sleek, shimmery fish gliding gracefully through the water. But, picture this instead: A Silver Carp will startle easily and come flying high out of a river or lake when the water is disturbed. The motor of a small boat is enough to bring on a storm of twenty-pound silver-carp missiles flying in all directions--even into a boat. Passengers can be thumped, pounded, and even knocked out by the leaping fish. And jumping Asian carp encountering a water skier can cause a terrible clash.

About fifty years ago, two types of Asian Carp, as an invasive species native to China and Siberia, were innocently imported to help clear catfish ponds of unwanted algae and vegetation in the US South. The smaller Silver Carp are the ones that jump, while the others, the hundred-pound Bighead Carp, stay below the surface. What happened was the carp got unintentionally relocated by flood waters, escaping from their small ponds to life on the Mississippi River, where they made their way upstream. Over five hundred miles of that big muddy river make up the western border of Illinois. From the Mississippi, the carp migrated down other rivers, including the Missouri, the Ohio to the Wabash, and the Illinois rivers, threatening to enter the Great Lakes, with their population multiplying exponentially year after year.

Asian carp survive in conditions where other fish die out, and they out-compete and replace more popular fish through their tendency to vacuum huge amounts of plankton through their gills as they swim. They have no need to bite on a fisherman’s bait with that diet. Virtually no predators and not many Americans want to eat these carp. It’s not that they taste bad, but their meat is heavily laced with tiny bones. Some of them are caught and used for fertilizer or animal feed, but they’re a menace, and we can’t get rid of them.

Fish springing up in the air look more mechanical than alive, unbelievable, spring-loaded--funny and horrifying at the same time. Silver carp are like an exploded version of themselves, popcorn with fins and a tail. They seem to have lost their minds as they hurl themselves up into the air in trance-like abandonment, colliding with each other, smacking into humans, and suicidally landing on the floors of boats.

When navigating the rivers of the Midwest, you are now entering the Carp Zone.

Elephant at the Macon County Fair

2011-08-28T11:46:00.001-06:00

photo by Joanna Key

Goldfish Bowls at the Fair

2011-08-27T10:04:00.001-06:00

photo by Joanna Key
County Fair 2011

Funnel Cakes

2011-08-27T09:59:00.001-06:00

photo by Joanna Key
County Fair 2011

Fish behind Stained Glass Window

2011-07-28T20:19:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

The Snowflake Font

2011-07-26T08:24:00.004-06:00

I wrote this after reading that cursive writing is officially obsolete, replaced by keyboarding lessons in the schools, and some kids can't even read cursive.

Lily Pads

2011-07-19T05:29:00.001-06:00

photo by Joanna Key

Summer Fireflies and Crow

2011-07-03T19:39:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Waves

2011-06-04T18:19:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Deer

2011-05-20T15:13:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Diagonal Rabbits

2011-04-26T03:58:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Elephant on a Pedestal

2011-04-26T03:57:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Bird Thief, Squealers

2011-04-26T03:54:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Haiku

2011-04-06T07:07:00.002-06:00

gout--
his big toe is full of uric acid crystals
like a geode

Raccoon

2011-04-02T07:10:00.003-06:00

by Joanna Key
pencil drawing/collage, illustration for the journal Bluestem

Squirrel

2011-03-31T17:20:00.002-06:00

pencil drawing/collage
illustration for 2011 print issue of the journal Bluestem

Ocelot

2011-03-07T06:40:00.001-06:00

collage with paint/Joanna Key

Gila Monster

2011-02-17T18:01:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Valentine for JR

2011-02-14T07:15:00.001-06:00

pencil drawing/collage by Joanna Key

"Year of the Rabbit 2"

2011-02-13T09:25:00.001-06:00

collage/drawing by Joanna Key

Happy Chinese New Year: It's the Year of the Rabbit

2011-02-02T18:53:00.004-06:00

collage and pencil drawing
by Joanna Key

Backbone Rug

2011-01-04T08:15:00.002-06:00

drawing by Joanna Key

The Cat and the Fiddle

2010-12-25T19:26:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

animal

2010-11-30T22:29:00.001-06:00

colored pencil drawing by Joanna Key

Elephant in the Room II

2010-10-22T21:57:00.002-06:00

collage and pencil drawing/
by Joanna Key

Goat Dance

2010-09-12T12:57:00.002-06:00

Collage/pencil drawing by Joanna Key--previously published in black/white on a yellow background on the cover of Karamu

Bar Graph

2010-08-29T19:42:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Two Dolphins

2010-08-15T16:22:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Knot

2010-08-14T20:12:00.002-06:00

drawing/collage by Joanna Key

Running to Me

2010-07-16T14:15:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Who Wrote the Book of Kells?

2010-07-04T19:22:00.003-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

The Exit-Ramp Blues

2010-05-17T08:56:00.004-06:00

Driving on Interstate 57 through Illinois, cornfields to the left, soybeans to the right, monotony. Am I there yet? Where’s my exit? Well, in 1956, to help us all get there faster, the Federal-Aid Highway Act launched the largest public works project ever undertaken: the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The grand plan was for a streamlined network of high-speed freeways linking all the cities in the country. There would be “controlled access” to these roads, to eliminate stops at intersections and traffic signals. There would be at least two lanes in each direction, to take out the risk of head-on collisions while passing. There would be a wide median to separate cars traveling opposite ways. There would be a broad shoulder to pull onto in emergencies, with rumble safety strips on some shoulders to scare drifting drivers back into alertness. Motorists could sail over railroad tracks below bridges without having to look or listen for train whistles. The roadways would have no sharp curves, and steep hills would be leveled, so a motorist could lock into a 50-mph speed (this speed limit has since been raised, of course) and could put his mind and, in some cases, his car, on cruise control.

The 47,000 miles of today’s interstate system have changed the way people live. Lives are saved when sick or injured people can be rushed to distant hospitals without delay, and commuters are more likely to have jobs far from their homes. Emergency evacuations, as for hurricanes or floods, can be more efficient when all traffic lanes are made outbound on both sides of the disaster area’s highways (“contraflow lane reversal”). Today, 24 percent of all traffic cruises down the interstates, and 41 percent of all truck freight is moved along the unclogged arteries of our highway system. The busiest interstate highway, I-405 in Los Angeles, accommodates 390,000 vehicles each day. In one section of I-10 through Houston, the highway has 26 lanes. In lesser traveled parts of western Texas and Utah, interstate drivers are even allowed to go 80 mph.

There is some logic to the naming of the highway grid: The odd-numbered highways run north and south, with the lowest numbers on the West Coast, leaving the even numbers to the east-west interstates, where the numbering starts in the South. The longest interstate, I-90, runs over 3,000 miles, connecting the dots between Seattle and Boston. Interstate 80 leads from San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey. Travel east from Los Angeles through Phoenix, Houston, and New Orleans, to Jacksonville, Florida, all the way on I-10. Go north from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota, on I-35 without having to look at a map even once. And I-95 takes you from the beaches of Miami straight on to the chilly Canadian border.

So, the U.S. interstate highway system is an amazing achievement. That does not change the fact that some people, myself included, absolutely hate traveling on the interstate. What happens when all distractions and inconveniences are taken away is that mind-numbing boredom sets in. The highway becomes like a conveyor belt predictably and uneventfully shipping travelers from place to place. The tires vibrate on the smooth pavement, and the engine hums. The mind, not needing to make any decisions, is no longer aware of what the body is doing. An interstate driver can easily be lulled into a hypnotic trance as he stares at the endless white lines on the highway. The bored motorist might try to fight drowsiness by turning up the radio and shifting channels from the classical station, singing along, or talking to other passengers or even to himself. To get more alert, he might turn off the heat and open a window, or desperately read out loud the signs and billboards (although by law, the billboards have to be over 600 feet from the road, thus more easily ignored). Sometimes it helps to chew gum or mindlessly eat snacks.

Hypnosis is not the only danger on the highway. A gusty wind across the open interstate might try to blow a car into another lane like a cat paw repeatedly batting a mouse. Trucks can easily dominate the road. High-profile vehicles can overturn in strong storms or jackknife on ice or snow. Work zones with their orange plastic cones can cause confusion and frustration. Cities that have outgrown their interstates have to deal with rush-hour bottlenecks, and their traffic can grind to a nerve-wracking halt after breakdowns and accidents.

Travel on the interstate is all about getting there as planned, without any unexpected turn of events. However, even the most hell-bent travelers have to stop sometime, so along with the original interstate plans came the phenomenon of the interstate rest area. The interstate rest area perfectly complements the soullessness of the interstates. Not surprisingly, there is a horror movie called Rest Stop. A lot of rest area buildings have the tacky design style of the fifties and sixties: sawtooth roofs, cinder block walls. Rumpled travelers with glazed eyes stiffly head for the bathrooms, still feeling the road vaguely vibrating through their nerves. No commercial businesses are allowed to operate at rest stops, so all food and drinks are mechanically extracted from vending machines. The smell of the bathrooms keeps anyone from lingering too long in there. And why do they have to have those fuzzy mirrors?

So to prevent the highway blues, instead, I like to take my time and travel the “blue highways”—the back roads, two-lane blacktops, which used to be shown in blue on the old maps. On these roads, I can brake impulsively and pull over when I see a roadside attraction, or as soon as I am tired, hungry, thirsty, or in need of stretching or a nap. When driving on back roads through towns and cities, I can watch people going about their lives. Distractions are what make life interesting. Exit off the interstate, and look at something besides that truck’s grill looming in the rearview mirror.

Pegasus Was a Zebra

2010-04-09T08:24:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

The Perfect Food

2010-04-03T15:32:00.007-06:00

“Walking on eggshells” means being careful. Being very careful. When you buy food, the bag containing the egg carton gets the most attention between the checkout lane and your home refrigerator. An eggshell is easily broken by accidental dropping or crushing. But paradoxically, if you cup an egg in your hands and squeeze as hard as you can, it won’t break.

Eggs deserve their own holiday. They are the perfect food, containing the highest quality of protein at only 70 calories an egg, at the lowest cost—about eleven cents an egg. The reputation of eggs was damaged in the sixties and seventies and again in the nineties by warnings about high cholesterol that have since been disproven. Eggs contain all vitamins except vitamin C, and a lot of minerals. They improve your nervous system and brain function, memory, and eyesight and satisfy your appetite way longer than cereal in the morning. After all, the contents of an egg can be the life support system for a developing chicken--its whole universe for the first three weeks of its existence. When the chicken starts getting claustrophobic inside the egg, it manages to liberate itself by cracking the shell with a special “egg tooth” on its beak. The eggs you eat, of course, are not fertilized and contain no chickens. A hen forms an eggshell in less than a day, and delivers it with the blunt end first. The average hen lays about five eggs a week. She sits on her eggs to keep them warm and rotates them about four times an hour.

People like to peel things and legitimately play with their food, so hard-boiled eggs are always fun. You get to crack them all over and then strip away the shell fragments to expose the white rubbery layer below. Then you get to open up the white, to display a powdery wet yellow ball. Really, hard-boiled egg is a misleading term. The texture and taste are better if you just hard-cook the eggs: immerse them in water, bring it to a boil, and then turn it off and let the eggs sit in the water for about fifteen minutes. If you overcook an egg, the outside of the yolk can turn ugly, a greenish black from surfacing iron and sulfur, although it is still okay to eat. By the way, it is never hot enough (150 degrees F) to fry an egg on the sidewalk.

Some eggs have twin yolks, and some have as many as nine yolks. Some chicken eggs have brown shells. If a hen has red earlobes, she will lay brown eggs; if a hen has white earlobes, she will lay white eggs. An egg has a sort of oval shape, except one end is always bigger than the other end. Inside the wide end, raw eggs have an air pocket that gets bigger with age. The raw yolk is of varying shades of yellow, depending on the hen’s diet, and the rest of the egg’s liquid is an opalescent “white.” An eggshell is porous and can absorb smells from your refrigerator, so do not store them in those egg-shaped holders in your refrigerator door. Market eggs have had their protective sealant coating scrubbed off, although they are then coated with oil to keep in moisture and keep out bacteria. The oil should be cleaned off with soapy water before dyeing an egg. An egg can be naturally dyed with hot water added to blueberries, red cabbage, beets, spinach, dill, turmeric, paprika, curry powder, or onion skins, or with grape juice, tea, or coffee.

Where in this nursery rhyme does it say that Humpty Dumpty was an egg?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Eight-Eyed Webmasters

2010-03-06T21:26:00.010-06:00

On Facebook, you can join a group called “I don’t care if the spider’s ‘not hurting anyone,’ I want it dead.” That sums up the attitude of a lot of the arachnophobics among us. But take a moment to reconsider spiders, if you just have a case of everyday bug-loathing. Let’s see if we can knock the spider off the top ten most-hated animals list (leaving the company of snakes, cockroaches, pigeons, and rats, etc.).

Spiders are artists: they are silk spinners and (many are) web weavers and also wily predators. The web-building spider releases strands of silk from its spinnerets. In the typical orb style of spiderweb, she strings the thicker, stronger radial threads out from the hub of the snare. She then connects the radials using stickier spiral threads, tiptoeing gingerly on her seven-sectioned legs, and grasping at strands with her opposable bristles and claws, managing not to get stuck in her own web. Spider silk, strong as nylon, can stretch over twice its length. The silk is resistant to fungi and bacteria and is sometimes used to seal human wounds. Those cobwebs draped across the dusty corners and shelves of uncleaned attics and basements can last forever, without rotting or decomposing. Birds like to use spider silk to build their nests. When the strands of an outdoor web lose their stickiness, the spider recycles the protein by eating her web and spinning a new one. In addition to the typical spiral orb-shaped web, other spiders create tangle webs (cobwebs), funnel webs, tubular webs (up trees and along the ground), sheet webs, or tent or dome webs.

The ballet of the capture begins with, say, a fly blundering into the web and adhering to the sticky threads. The spider sitting nearby knows she’s caught something because she senses the vibrations. Even though she has eight eyes arranged in a freakish pattern around her head, her eyesight is poor. She pounces on the fly and injects venom with her fangs. Then she wraps her prey in a silk winding-sheet and waits for it to die. People usually work all day to earn money to buy their food. Some spend their day hunting or fishing for their food. But the trapper, like a spider, has the superior strategy, when you think about it.

Most spider venom is not toxic enough to affect humans unless a person is allergic to it. Most spiders cannot even puncture our skin because their fangs are too small and weak. Spiders usually only bite if they are trapped in your clothing or swatted at while crawling on your skin. Pay no attention to the creepy urban legend about the nest of black widow spiders that lived in a lady’s beehive hairdo and eventually killed her by biting her scalp. You see, spiders are mostly harmless and even beneficial, doing their share of keeping down the insect population. House spiders kill flies, crickets, and other insects. Don’t put a house spider outdoors to save its life because it will probably not survive. House spiders do not “come in from the cold” through cracks under doors and in window frames. They spend their whole lives in your house. You find spiders in your bathtub because the tub sides are too slick for them to climb back up. Spiders are more active in the evening, and the ones you might see in your house could be males out looking for females. The shy females and young, meanwhile, are probably hiding next to their webs in your crawl space or storage areas, under stairs, between walls and floors, or behind appliances.

Most spiders leave a trailing dragline as they walk or descend from a height. Spiderlings, newborn spiders, which are tiny and colorless, sail off for long distances at the end of a silk thread to wherever the wind delivers them. So spiders start life out by ballooning and then settle down for a short adult life--a season or a year of weaving. Who hasn’t stopped in awe on a hike through the woods, face-to-face with a sparkly dew-encrusted spiderweb?

If I still have not won you over to spider-appreciation, then maybe you should read or watch Charlotte’s Web sometime. “Day after day the spider waited, head down, for an idea to come to her. Hour by hour she sat motionless, deep in thought. Having promised Wilbur that she would save his life, she was determined to keep her promise. Charlotte was naturally patient. She knew from experience that if she waited long enough, a fly would come to her web; and she felt sure that if she thought long enough about Wilbur’s problem, an idea would come to her mind.”

Seasonal Haiku

2010-02-21T11:44:00.004-06:00

icy black snow boulders
from wheel wells of cars--
kicking them in the street

Shivers, Goose Bumps, A Three Dog Night

2010-02-06T19:30:00.004-06:00

Nights in the frozen North can get bone-chillingly cold. Huddling next to a stretched-out dog can help you stay warm. But when the temperatures plunge even further, it takes two or even three dogs piled around each shivering human to help insulate against the bitter cold. A wind-howling, subzero, icy night is a “three-dog night.” Joy to the world? I don’t think so, at least not in this kind of winter. Furless, featherless people are just not designed for freezing cold climates!

Our ancestors were tropical creatures who tried to stay cool in hot and humid climates. But as people migrated north, they had to learn how to deal with the opposite problem: how to stay warm. Ironically, some of the most common modern health problems are adaptations to living in a climate that we are not well-equipped for. High blood-sugar levels, as in diabetes, help to generate heat as you burn off glucose. Layers of stored fat, as in obesity, help insulate you against the cold air. Those were good adjustments at first, but in our advanced civilization, we spend our time in well-heated buildings and wear sheepskin, thinsulate, and down-feathered clothing outside to stay warm, and those body modifications have just become health problems.

Cold weather can kill you. To prevent freezing, stay active when outdoors in the cold, and be well fed, so you can generate heat as you burn calories. When the temperature falls anywhere below 77°F, the unclothed body reacts to cool air. The first sign of coldness will be goose bumps on the skin. These are the human attempt to have “big fur,” which you’ve probably seen on a cold or frightened dog or cat. The muscles contract around our hair follicles, making the hairs stand up, and if we were more furry, this would create a layer of air above the skin that acts like insulation. The actual effects of goose bumps are that we look like plucked poultry and we realize we are cold. The second stage of coldness is shivering, which we do to generate heat, through uncontrollable muscle contractions. Ironically, the signs of coldness make you look anything but cool.

As the temperatures drop, and goose bumps and shivering fail to produce enough heat to warm you up, then your fingers, toes, ears, and nose start to feel cold and more bloodless than is normal. Cold hands lose their dexterity as the nerves and muscles get cold; all of a sudden you can’t even button a button or tie your shoe. If you stay out in the cold, you now risk getting “frostnip,” which is a less dangerous form of frostbite. Frostnipped skin is white or yellow and waxy but turns red and recovers when thawed. After longer exposure to cold, body parts can go numb and get frostbitten. The skin tissue freezes as ice crystals form inside it, and blood vessels are damaged. The extremity is permanently harmed by frostbite and turns purplish or black and blistered when thawed. If the tissue dies, you might even have to have a finger or toe amputated. The safest way to thaw out frozen body parts is immersion in warm water. The pain from thawing out a frostnipped or frostbitten body part is intense, so take some pain meds before you start.

When cold, the body’s plan is to divert blood away from the extremities to preserve heat around the organs. But when the body’s core temperature starts to drop (called hypothermia), this is more dangerous than frostbite. You might lose an expendable body part (not that anyone wants to lose an ear or their nose or toe …), but you aren’t going to die from frostbite. Signs of the more life-threatening hypothermia include mental confusion, irrational thinking, slurred speech, loss of muscle coordination, and falling down (one reason not to drink when outdoors in the cold—hypothermia symptoms are like being really drunk). Simple shivering becomes more violent and uncontrollable, and then stops during hypothermia, which is a bad sign. The next stage is unconsciousness. The body’s normal core temperature is 98.6°F. At around 86°F core temp, you pass out. Your heart rate and breathing slow way down, and you can appear dead even when you are not. The heart stops if the core temp drops ten or twenty more degrees. People who freeze to death are often well preserved because the microorganisms of decay cannot decompose the body at really low temps.

So, to prevent freezing, dress in waterproof, windproof layers with mittens, not gloves, and insulated boots. Even if your hair is going to get flat and full of static later, wear a hat because you lose a lot of valuable body heat through your head. The three dogs you’re using to keep warm should also not be left out in cold weather because they can get frostbite on their ears, tails, foot pads, legs, and genitals, and they can get hypothermia too.

Once in a Blue Moon

2010-01-08T14:54:00.010-06:00

The “blue moon” on New Year’s Eve would have been more cool if it had actually been blue. But, like red hair (which is really orange), Great Blue Herons (which are really grey), and Purple Coneflowers (which are really pink), etc., we’re supposed to go along with it, black is white, Big Brother, 1984, right? The supposedly rare time period “once in a blue moon” actually happens once every two-and-a-half years, whenever a month contains two full moons. So a blue moon is not that rare, considering the moon is full every twenty-nine-and-a-half days.

But don’t get upset--the Moon has been known to be blue! And I’m sure, whenever it happened, it was heralded as a truly rare and exciting event. In the early 1950s, after huge forest fires in Sweden and in Canada, the widespread smoke, and the ashes and dust in the clouds, made the Moon look blue (and the sun was lavender). In the late 1800s, after the volcano Krakatoa erupted, the Moon looked blue for almost two years (and the sunsets were green). Other big storms and volcanic eruptions, including Mt. St. Helens in 1980, have occasionally also caused the Moon to look blue.

Not that the usual yellow/white moon isn’t magical and interesting enough without looking blue very often. Can you imagine if we had eighteen moons like Saturn does, and they all appeared full at different times? We’d be hyper and wild all month long! The words “lunacy” and “lunatic” come from the periodic craziness caused by a full moon (“luna” is Latin for moon). For some reason, certain scientists have based their careers on trying to disprove the connection between crazy human behavior and the full moon. One researcher even claimed that the only way to prove the connection between lunacy and the full moon would be to put some people on another planet for comparison! Yet, other researchers, as if most of us hadn’t noticed, have reported that there is a rise in creativity at the full moon, as well as a rise in psychotic behavior and crime. As Cat Stevens sang, “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.” Full-moon nights are many times brighter than the nights of darker phases.

Furthermore, the gravitational pull of the Moon tugs at the Earth, trying to pull it closer, and this drags the ocean upward and helps to create tides. The Moon is moving an inch away from the Earth every year. If an airplane could defy the Earth’s gravity, it would take twenty-six days to fly to the Moon. It took the Apollo astronauts two days to get there. Watching the astronauts do the moonwalk (long before Michael Jackson) in their bulky white spacesuits on TV in the summer of 1969 was definitely one of the most surrealistic events of my lifetime.

Moonlight. There is no such thing. Both the Moon and the Earth are dark spheres that reflect the sun’s light. The Moon always keeps the same side toward us as it spins and orbits around us, so there is a “dark side of the Moon” that we never see, even though that side is not always actually dark. Occasionally, the Earth comes between the Moon and the Sun and blocks the Sun’s light, so the Moon is eclipsed. The Moon sometimes rises in the day and sometimes at night, but the full moon rises as the Sun sets. On the Moon there are waterless “seas” that seem to have been named by Monty Python’s Flying Circus: the Sea That Has Become Known, the Sea of Tranquility, the Sea of Mists, the Sea of Crises, the Sea of Fertility, the Sea of William Henry Smyth, etc. There is also the Lake of Forgetfulness, the Lake of Dreams, the Marsh of Decay, and the Marsh of Sleep, etc. on the Moon. Craters pockmarking the Moon’s surface are dents caused by collisions with hurtling meteors.

“the moon if you’ll/notice follows us like a big yellow dog”—e. e. cummings

Luck and the Faux Rabbit's Foot

2009-12-26T15:29:00.003-06:00

Don’t you hate it when people say “things happen for a reason”? They say this to make you feel better after something bad happens. But, really, things happen for a non-reason; if you have to call it something, then call it “luck.” Still, just because luck has a name, do not think it is something you can define or control. Things happen when an uncountable number of random forces converge in one particular time and place. You can look back and try to simplify and explain it afterwards. You can even use “bad luck” as an excuse for something bad happening, if it makes you feel better. But luck always hides behind the elusive, intangible sway of events, like a ghost horse that cannot be harnessed.

An outcome is based on luck, skill, and effort, with the last two factors more or less connected with experience. The luck aspect is what makes any outcome unpredictable, in spite of skill and effort. And that unpredictability is what makes life, and also games, sports, and movies, exciting. Who would want to play a game or watch a sport or movie in which the outcome is already known? That is why games involving the right balance of luck and skill are so addictive and popular (poker, video games, most sports, etc.). A game or sport that is all skill and no luck would be boring and discouraging to beginners and bad players. A game that is all luck and no skill would provide no motivation for players to become skilled and try to win. Of course, when money is involved, the stakes are higher, and wins and losses become more important. Even when playing a free, pointless video game on a home computer, getting your highest score ever--by a combination of a lucky screen, good timing, and practice--is a way to get a surge of excitement without even having a life, as the term used to be defined, pre-Internet.

At the most important life-changing moments in our lives, luck closes the deal. So, if you want to carry a rabbit’s foot around, go ahead, if it makes you feel more optimistic and less worried--but get a synthetic, bright blue, faux rabbit’s foot, please. Defenseless rabbits themselves don’t seem to have lives charmed by good luck, in spite of their allegedly fortunate feet; they’re relentlessly chased and eaten by foxes, coyotes, weasels, owls, hawks, snakes, and humans. You can carry any kind of amulet, but respect the fact that the element of luck, good or bad, has nothing to do with you. Things happen for non-reasons, which are random, infinitely complicated, and impersonal. You are just an ordinary person without a crystal ball, connected to and affected by the outside world, who cannot possibly be aware of all the factors that will lead to the outcome you so desperately want. Luck propels you across that juncture, the longest seconds of your life, when you wait, hand on the phone, for an answer, yes or no. You got the job. Your biopsy was negative. The seconds when the basketball rolls around the rim. The pause before you pick up your cards. The rabbit dives into its burrow, seconds ahead of the fox--safe for today.

Panda inside Snow Globe

2009-12-17T20:55:00.003-06:00

collage/pencil drawing by Joanna Key

Climbing the Eiffel Tower

2009-11-29T11:37:00.003-06:00

collage by Joanna Key
originally published in Karamu (1998) and Poet's Market (2000)

Queen of the Spelling Bee

2009-11-22T18:08:00.012-06:00

collage by Joanna Key, previously published in Karamu (2004) and Poets Market (2006)

When I was in third grade, I won a spelling bee. I was the last kid standing, and the teacher asked me to spell “isthmus.” A vision of that word flashed through my mind; I’d seen it on the cover of a Cap’n Crunch comic book called “I’m Dreaming of a White Isthmus,” and I probably thought that title was hilarious when I was eight. A good speller is a person who has befriended a lot of words. Most good spellers will tell you that a misspelled word just looks wrong and jumps off the page (or screen) at them. Most of us were never trained or coached. Unfortunately, good spellers are less special these days, since spell checkers came along. Like the math-challenged among us who were rescued by calculators, bad spellers have found their new best friend in the spell checker.

In Finland, Germany, and Spain, almost everyone is a good speller. Spelling is not even taught in their schools. They probably don’t even have spelling bees. English has more hard-to-spell words than most languages, partly because we have borrowed words from so many languages (for example, kindergarten, camouflage, hygiene, hors d'oeuvres, daiquiri, and guitar). Basically, there are no reliable rules in English spelling, because there are usually many exceptions to each so-called rule. For example, look at the old standard rule “i before e, except after c, or when sounded like “ay,” as in neighbor and weigh.” A few exceptions come to mind immediately: ancient, science, foreign, height, protein, either, and weird.

Instead of memorizing spelling rules, you might as well just write out each of your problem words twenty times, memorizing them by taking note of silent or unusual letter patterns. Stare at the words; spell them out loud, accenting any problem letters; and write them on paper (don’t type) as if you were training your hand to perform a routine. And, when in doubt about a spelling, use a dictionary. Reading a lot is the best way to become a better speller. When you see a word in a sentence, it has more meaning than in a list of unrelated spelling words, so you’re more likely to learn it. A lot of people misspell irregular words simply because they have never seen the word, or any word with a similar pattern, before in print.

Tricks can help you to remember some commonly confused words: “Their” is a possessive pronoun used for animals and people. Animals and people both have eyes (“i’s"), so use “their” instead of “there” when referring to “their house,” “their cages,” etc. "Parallel" has two parallel “l’s” in the middle of the word. On Wednesdays we Never Eat Soup. Never believe a lie. You write a letter on stationery.

You obviously cannot count on spell checker to catch homonyms (their/there, break/brake, piece/peace, no/know, aisle/isle, etc.) or words the spell-check database can’t recognize because you have mangled them so badly. Really bad spellers can use special “bad speller’s dictionaries” that contain common misspellings (because how can you look up a word you can’t even begin to spell correctly?). “Google,” by the way, was misspelled by its developers. It was based on the word “googol,” meaning the figure one followed by one hundred zeros. “Googly (-eyed)” actually has something to do with rolling, bulging eyes. “Cocoa” is also a misspelling that stuck (the word should have been spelled “cacao”). Manuscripts written in Middle English followed no spelling rules at all. The same word in Chaucer’s writings, for example, was sometimes spelled in several different ways even in a single sentence!

I have to mention ghoti (certainly you’ve heard of Ghoti Hook, the 1990s Christian punk band), an imaginary respelling of the word “fish”: gh is pronounced like the "gh" in rough, o is pronounced like the "o" in women, and ti is pronounced like the "ti" in lotion. If you’re a word geek like I am, you enjoy this kind of fun fact. If not, your thinking probably runs more along these lines:
How do you spell “elephant”?
E-l-l-a-f-u-n-t.
Wrong. That’s not how the dictionary spells it.
Well, I’m still right. You asked me how I spell it.

Got That Circadian Rhythm

2009-10-23T20:19:00.004-06:00

This time of year, as the sun sets before you can even walk the dog after work, some animals get ready to migrate away, some to reproduce, and some to hibernate for the winter. For some critters, it’s getting harder to find insects and green plants to eat, so why not curl up in a den and sleep for a few months? The star of hibernation is the American black bear, who first makes himself fat with berries, pine needles, and roots in the fall. Then he can spend up to about 100 days resting, without eating food, drinking water, urinating, defecating, or exercising. People have no such ability to sleep that long without wasting away and getting dehydrated. You’ve heard of Rip Van Winkle, who woke up bewildered after sleeping for twenty years, marveling at his very long beard and the absence of the dog he had been walking? A tall tale, I’m afraid. Most people are locked into a sleep/wake pattern that is synchronized with the rotation of the Earth: a 24-hour cycle called the circadian rhythm. We are even locked into the light and dark influences of our own locations, as anyone who has switched time zones and come unglued by jet lag can tell you.

We miss one-third of what goes on around us by being asleep. But just try to do without sleep for one night or more: you’ll get disoriented, paranoid, and irritable, and eventually start to hallucinate and lose the ability to make decisions, concentrate, and multi-task. After a few days of sleep deprivation, you will feel as if you are dreaming while awake and losing your sanity. “Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds,” says JoJo Jensen. Depending on genetics, people need between five and ten hours of sleep each night--most commonly eight hours. In some cultures, people average around six hours per night but take a two-hour siesta in the afternoon. Dogs get a daily average of around 11 hours worth of sleep and naps, cats around 16 hours, and bats hang upside down asleep for a total of around 20 hours per day. Horses sleep standing up with their eyes open, only about three hours per day; no wonder they’re skittish. The most freakish are the sleep habits of dolphins. Because these sea mammals swim nonstop but have to breathe air, the two hemispheres of their brains sleep in shifts, with the corresponding eye remaining open.

Sleep is really still as much of a mystery as when it was believed that the soul left the body and migrated as we slept. Scientists have a lot of complicated and conflicting theories about why we sleep, but they mostly disregard the fact that all animals, mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, and insects also have to sleep on a regular schedule roughly synchronized to the circadian rhythm, so the function of sleep must be pretty basic and universal, whatever it is. In reality, sleep poses a safety risk for all animals except for protected domesticated pets and livestock and for humans in their locked homes in their warm, comfortable beds. A sleeping animal is vulnerable to predators and exposure to the elements as its body temperature lowers during sleep. There’s no survival benefit to sleep. It’s also sort of a waste of time if you’re a workaholic or have an overscheduled life.

Lying down with the intention of sleeping might be the first time a person relaxes all day. You choose a comfortable position, tune out your thoughts, start to breathe slowly and rhythmically, and suddenly you fall down the rabbit hole of sleep. When people sleep, we sort of become more like plants, unable to get around or talk or respond to the environment in anything but a vague manner. While asleep, we still can sense light through our eyelids, and we get disturbed by noise since we can’t “close” our ears. I actually used to believe the story about the Sandman causing sleep by putting sand in our eyes, because there was “sand,” the evidence, in my eyes in the morning.

Now the world is awake and lit up 24/7 more than ever before, with the Internet and television, etc., connecting us to other time zones and businesses open round the clock. Also, overconsumption of caffeine makes us unaware that we’re tired, or it makes us unable to sleep when we lie down in bed. Rotating work shifts boost the economy, although out-of-sync shift workers tend to be drowsy on the job and unable to sleep enough during the day. The Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear power plant disasters and the Exxon Valdez oil spill were all blamed on unalert workers. Lots of preventable accidents are caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel. Some people just suffer from insomnia, taking longer than the ideal ten minutes to fall asleep. If you try to stop your mind from racing by the old counting sheep idea, you should know that some actual sheep farmers in the UK do not count their sheep using “one, two three, four, etc.” They count their sheep like this: yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, teezar, leezar, cattera, horna, dik, yandik, tandik, tetherdik, bumpit, tan-a-bumpit, thethera-bumpit, methera-bumpit, jigot. See if that works.

Viruses: The Undead

2009-10-02T20:55:00.006-06:00

The moral of the story so far this year must be that all people, globally, rich, poor, young, and old, etc., are interconnected, whether they want to be or not. And, furthermore, humans are intimately linked with birds and pigs.

As different parts of the global economy continued to cave in earlier this year, almost everyone took a hit in one way or another. Then, when we were down, we started hearing about a re-emergence of the swine flu virus that could randomly take innocent lives as it spread across the planet as fast as a Twitter rumor. People paraded around with their faces half-concealed behind masks. Even airline attendants were taking travellers’ temperatures and sending them away to doctors to obtain “fit-to-fly” certificates”! What kind of a double curse was this?

“Influenza” was named by eighteenth-century Italians, who believed the horrible plagues periodically ravaging their towns were caused by unfavorable astrological “influences.” Actually, flu epidemics are spread by the touching or random exchange of money, among many other objects and surfaces. Coughing and sneezing viruses into another person’s “space” also help to spread the flu. And the surprising, low-profile culprit, the original host of almost all flu viruses, is actually birds. To oversimplify, when virus-containing bird droppings get into a water supply, the recombining of germs can cause widespread sickness in humans and pigs as well.

Why can’t we just kill viruses the same way we can overpower bacteria with antibiotics? One problem is that viruses are not alive to begin with, so we can’t kill them. Viruses don’t eat, and they are not made up of cells. Viruses are just tiny organic substances that can only be seen with an electron microscope. A virus is basically just a strand of DNA or RNA wrapped in a jacket of protein. The only way a virus can reproduce at all is to invade a cell and hijack its control center, commanding it to manufacture more viruses. Sometimes the host cell will explode like a popped balloon when it is filled to maximum capacity with viruses. Sometimes a virus instead crouches dormant in a host cell for months or years, waiting to attack.

A problem with flu viruses in particular is that they are forever changing their genetic makeup, which means they can evade both our hit-or-miss vaccine recipes, “antiviral” symptom-relief drugs, and the flu antibodies we’ve already built up in our immune systems. Another issue with flu viruses is that they are often transmitted before the initially infected person is even showing symptoms.

To make a person sick, first a virus has to make it past several lines of defense. First the skin keeps out viruses. But sometimes they get in through the nose, mouth, or even eyes. If this happens, the body launches an all-out counterattack. The most serious casualties during flu epidemics are often from sudden and intense immunologic firestorms in the lungs or other organs of previously healthy victims, often young adults. That’s why new strains of the flu like the latest version of H1N1 cause alarm.

When the immune system is fighting off a milder flu attack, taking over-the-counter medicine can interfere with the healing process. Fever, coughing, sneezing, runny noses, and even vomiting and diarrhea are all the body’s attempts to deactivate or eliminate viruses from the body as quickly as possible. The symptom of extreme fatigue should be seen as a signal to take some time out and rest, for a change, and let the immune system do its work. Don’t just suppress your symptoms and try to carry on as usual. Schools and workplaces are finally realizing they need to relax their punitive attendance policies to avoid spreading viruses. Public health officials are also finally instructing people to cough and sneeze into their sleeves or a tissue (duh) instead of covering their mouths and releasing germs into their hands and then contaminating a handrail, door handle, computer keyboard, phone, ATM machine, etc.

“Money goes from hand to hand, and [the swine flu] goes from man to man.” (paraphrase from the song “My Baby’s Just Like Money” by Merle Haggard)

Back to School: Give the Room Some Ritalin!

2009-08-20T19:11:00.008-06:00

Labor Day, a time of dread. My experience with school could be summed up in four words: waiting for the bell. The last bell of the day, that is. If they had that label back then, I suppose I would have been dubbed “ADD.” As it was, I learned how to bite my fingernails; the subtly different flavors of each crayon I ate (the bitter taste of red violet was the worst); how to squirt Elmer’s glue all over my palm, let it dry, and then peel it off like shed skin; how to pass notes swiftly to my friends when the teacher’s back was turned; and I taught myself how to draw. I never did figure out a comfortable way to sit in those hard chairs.

The diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) should be changed to the diagnosis of “Bored.” The symptoms are restlessness, fidgeting, distractibility, and inattentiveness. Maybe, just change that diagnosis to “Kid.” Since the typical classroom has not kept up with the changes of the twenty-first century and was never satisfactory to begin with, we have more and more kids getting distressed in school and/or being given questionable diagnoses like ADD. Instead of medicating these kids, let’s give the classroom itself a check-up and a diagnosis.

The typical class today also has many kids with “hidden” neurological, temperamental, and medical conditions such as Asperger’s, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression, medication side-effects, epilepsy, and allergies. These kids have to spend the whole school day trapped in a distressing classroom environment. When a lot of kids are hypersensitive, maybe it is more logical to correct the environmental problems instead of labeling the kids with a disorder and medicating them to fit in better. The debatable diagnosis of ADD has been placed on (statistics vary widely) about 12 percent of all kids! That’s so common that it does not even seem abnormal to me. On the other hand, medications for ADD can cause abnormal side effects like insomnia, lack of appetite, jitters, hair loss, nausea, and irritability.

To make the school kids more restless and agitated, a lot of classrooms have fluorescent lights, which hum and flicker and cause either obvious or subconscious distress to the nervous system. In extreme cases, fluorescent lights trigger migraines, epileptic seizures, dissociation, and trance states. A lot of classrooms have few or no windows, eliminating natural light and making a lot of kids feel tense and claustrophobic, like they’re in prison and cut off from the outside world. Sitting up straight in hard, nonadjustable school chairs all day long would be uncomfortable for people of any age. No wonder kids fidget and squirm. Rows of desks all facing forward reinforce the idea that the teacher is the only important person in the room and the children should be seen but not heard. A circle, U-shape, or grouped tables might feel more inclusive.

Classrooms are often too cold or too hot, making kids feel tired or uncomfortable. The heating or air-conditioning motors and fans might also be too loud, making it harder to hear and focus on the lessons. Rooms that are not soundproof may cause kids to be distracted, especially when bored, by noise from the hallway, neighboring rooms, and outdoors. Carpeting is more soundproof than hard flooring and can also make a classroom feel more homelike and less institutional. Carpets also make a room safer because they can cut down on injuries from falls. Other negative factors in a classroom that might trigger allergies, asthma, or other problems in students are strong smells from chemical cleaners, markers, glue, perfume, or mold and mildew from defective ventilation or rotting building materials.

When a kid feels healthy and relaxed, he or she is more likely to become open to learning. A kid labeled as ADD might go home and hyperfocus for hours on an art project, book, video game, sport, or play activity. Maybe attention “deficit” is not accurate at all! Maybe it is not that these kids can’t pay attention to the teacher; they just can’t feign interest in boring lessons in an uncomfortable classroom where they are expected to sit motionless and quiet. And why do so many people labeled as ADD in childhood “outgrow” their so-called disorder as soon as they leave school, often to become creative adults with greater-than-average energy levels? Maybe so-called ADD is just a different kind of temperament that thrives on more self-paced learning, is intolerant to boredom, and is hypersensitive to the sensory insults in the typical classroom setting. How many of these creative daydreamers are being medicated so the class as a whole can be more manageable and passive?

Kids on the autism spectrum frequently cannot filter environmental stimuli and therefore attempt to process all incoming sensory information at once, instead of tuning into what is most important. For all kids, not just these, the key prevention of distress is to give them some kind of control over their environment so they don’t feel trapped in their chairs at their desks, with nowhere to escape. Sensory overload can cause high anxiety, panic, headaches, aggression, tiredness, or withdrawal--all of which impair learning, of course. Classrooms should have quiet private areas where kids can retreat when they need to.

With all students who are being labeled with attention disorders in school, other factors should also be investigated: lack of sleep or lack of exercise, poor nutrition and vitamin deficiencies, visual or hearing impairments, side-effects from medication, or undiagnosed medical conditions or diseases. A final note to my teachers (all teachers): a child's attention is a gift.

crickets chirping

2009-08-11T22:17:00.005-06:00

illustration by Joanna Key

Q: What do you get when you cross a violin with a washboard?

A: A cricket

*crickets chirping*
That notation stands for the awkward silence when nobody laughs at a lame joke, or it can indicate any lack of response that is empty as the soundtrack of a summer night. Did you ever lie down to sleep with the windows open on an August evening, just to sink into the drone of the neighborhood cricket orchestra? To be fair, the serenade could include grasshoppers, katydids, and cicadas too. But crickets intrigue me more.

Crickets are Olympic-style jumpers that hide from the light and screech loudly enough to keep away any bird that wants to eat them. That raspy techno din, which is basically the male crickets’ nocturnal mating call, is produced with just a pair of wings. The cricket raises its forewings and pulls the file teeth on one wing like a violin bow, across the ridged scraper of the other wing, to create an organic third-shift industrial noise. The papery membranes on the crickets’ wings vibrate to amplify the nighttime sound, which is badly timed, considering it’s not exactly a lullaby. There is a rhythm, usually two to three pulses at a time. You can hear it a mile away. Most species of crickets chirp faster as the temperature goes higher. They make music to grind your teeth to. Male crickets must be desperate for mates, because the cry sounds urgent and relentless. Sometimes the chirp is a signal of aggression or a danger alert, instead of a mating call. Two male crickets can get into vicious fights where they literally tear each other apart.

In China and Japan, some people like that cricket sound a lot and think that crickets are lucky. They keep crickets in their bedrooms in cages that can be made from bamboo, metal, gourds, clay, ivory, horn, pottery, jade, or bone. Or they buy man-made electronic crickets. Their public-address systems occasionally broadcast recordings of singing insects into subways and stores. I think that crickets resemble roaches too closely to be allowed into my house. Having a singing cricket under my floorboards would remind me more of an entomological telltale heart than the promise of good fortune.

In this country, live crickets from commercial cricket factories are brought into some homes as food for pet lizards, turtles, salamanders, and spiders. Careful when picking them up: crickets have strong jaws and can bite people. They can also eat holes in clothes and shoes indoors, and strawberries and tomatoes outside. Crickets are sometimes cannibalistic. In the fall, the female crickets, who have been lured to mating calls via a hearing organ located on their knees (I told you crickets were intriguing), lay their eggs. Then the adult crickets die with the first frost, having faith that their orphaned next generation will hatch in the spring and carry on the species.

When I worked at the University of Texas in Austin, there would sometimes be cricket population explosions. Swarms of crickets would invade the stadium and other buildings, including the tall tower on the campus (that same tower made unfortunately famous in 1966 when a student climbed to the lookout balcony and shot and killed fourteen people and wounded many others). The mass of crickets left excrement in the tower building, where I delivered books, and many crickets died inside, causing an overpoweringly bad smell. Every morning for weeks, I’d see janitors sweeping or trying to vacuum up piles of dead crickets. You couldn’t walk without crunching crickets on the floor. They were crawling up the walls and jumping around at people too.

Shiny black cricket
parks outside my window
with its motor running
--Joanna Key

The Cricket Wails
perchance the cricket is bemoaning
her husband eaten by a cat
--Kikaku

Every Hair Has a Silver Lining

2009-07-26T21:51:00.008-06:00

What did the blonde get on her IQ test?

Drool

Did you hear about the blonde who was taking notes in class as the teacher wrote them on the board? When the teacher erased the board, the blonde erased her notes.

How do you make a blonde laugh on Saturday?

Tell her a joke on Wednesday.

How nice to have your identity reduced to the color of your hair! And then they proceed to regard all "blondes" as the stupidest category of human! The way everybody in this culture obsesses about hair color is like an obscure blonde joke itself, without a punch line. The naked ape spends huge amounts of time in front of mirrors and large sums of money in salons, dyeing, cutting, and styling the long strands of protein cells growing out of its scalp. Unlike other furless mammals, like dolphins, seals, hippos, etc., we seem to have retained these heads of hair that grow out at the rate of six inches per year until they reach a terminal length and stop, after about three or four years. Why aren't our head-hairs short like those on our arms and legs? Then we'd be pretty smooth all over like dolphins, and our heads would not not attract so much attention, and there would be no blonde jokes. We'd have to gauge intelligence in a more intelligent manner!

A hair, being "biologically inert," has no blood, nerves, or pain. That means that people have a fixation on something that is actually dead. The root is alive, but the hair strands you are fascinated with are no more alive than the fibers of your clothes. But, still, hair seems to have a life of its own sometimes. If a blonde swims in a chlorinated swimming pool all summer (no, this is not a blonde joke), then her hair will start to turn green. If a person dyes his hair black and swims all summer in a pool, his hair turns orange. Hair can be "unmanageable." If you get older, your hair will surely turn grey. All on its own, at no cost, without the help of Clairol.

Some people's hair turns prematurely grey as early as high school, from vitamin deficiency, thyroid problems, anemia, smoking, or life in the fast lane. But the average person's hair starts magically changing to silver around age 34 for Caucasians, age 39 for those of Asian descent, and age 44 for people of African descent. The greying process can take decades. This natural event gets a bad reputation because it's connected to aging, although it is not painful and does not slow us down or impair us in any way. It's just a color change, like painting a room.

The silver and eventually white color of the hair is from a natural accumulation, in the hair follicle, of hydrogen peroxide--yes, that same stuff that is found in those particularly unattractive brown plastic containers, that fizzes up in cuts. Your hair decides to bleach itself and save you the trouble of doing it yourself. But some people just can't face the grey-haired person in the mirror, so they ritually start visiting the salon (if they didn't already), dyeing their hair each month or even more often, and going to war with the roots of another color. They emerge transformed. It's an easy way to reinvent yourself, since we do tend to sum up a person's identity by the color of her hair.

Why do they even ask people their hair color on driver's licenses? What do they say? "Varies." "Purple." "Streaked." "Was grey."

No Sweat

2009-06-27T22:53:00.008-06:00

Summer in Illinois. Heat advisories are in effect, they keep talking about dew points, and we're warned to stay indoors. The neighborhood air conditioners kick on and off. It makes you wonder how humans somehow managed to survive for millenniums without air-conditioning, until the middle of last century. Well, in the twenties, movie theaters started using air-conditioning to lure people in out of the heat. Then, department stores became another mecca of coolness. By the sixties, 12 percent of all homeowners had acquired the godlike ability to condition their air, making it cool, dry, and even filtered, with the flip of a switch. Today, about 80 percent of all homes have AC, although that number goes up in the South to about 96 percent. And that marked the end of an era in the civilization of mankind: no more hanging out on the porch, trying to catch a breeze on a summer evening. No more porches being built. People even started relocating to places like Houston, the most humid city in the United States (Yuma, Arizona, is the least humid, in case you were wondering).

Humidity is so totally unpleasant because it makes the body's natural cooling system inefficient. In hot, dry environments, your core temperature rises from the magic optimal 98.6 degrees F, and you sweat, and the perspiration evaporates, and then you sort of cool off. But in humidity, you sweat and sweat some more, and still feel hot, damp, sticky, and sluglike. Even with your two sets of sweat glands, you can't get comfortable. One kind of sweat gland (eccrine) is found all over the body, coiling up from the lower to the upper layers of the skin, producing odorless sweat made mostly of water with a few electrolytes (salts) and a trace of heavy metals that you might have picked up somewhere. The other kind of sweat gland (apocrine), found in the armpits and groin, produces sweat that contains fat and oils. This kind becomes more active at puberty, reacts to stress as well as heat, and tends to mix with bacteria to cause the characteristic scent that gives sweating its bad reputation. The deodorant industry gains millions of loyal customers, who faithfully spray or roll on chemicals that block the sweat glands.

The other problem with sweating is that it can cause cause dehydration. Water is essential to life; you can't survive more than a few days without it. As most trivia buffs know, the human body is about 60 percent water, more or less depending on how much body fat you have (fat contains less water than other tissue). That means, if you weigh 150 pounds, then 90 of those pounds are water! We're sort of like walking water balloons. If our fluid levels go down from too much sweating (or other causes), we deprive our organs of their blood supply. To tell if you're dehydrated, besides being thirsty, you will realize that you have not peed for a long time and when you do pee, the color is dark yellow. You might be getting head rushes at that point too. Later stages of dehydration bring on bad headaches, muscle cramps, mental confusion, and extreme fatigue. At 10 percent fluid loss, you should be at the ER. So drink liquids, and sports drinks that replace water and salts if you plan on sweating for a long time, and also take in water through foods like grapes, melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, citrus, etc.

Ironically, people where I live--in an area so humid that garlic powder turns solid by June--still sometimes pay money to sit in saunas at health clubs. The sauna originated in Finland, and other cultures across time and place have ritually induced sweating by creating similar structures, which were also places for people or families to gather together and perspire (like they did on a front porch in summer). Native Americans have their sweat lodges, which are womblike domes where people sit around a pit filled with softball-sized rocks, usually granite or limestone. The rocks are brought into the lodge after being heated in an outside fire for hours until they glow, and occasionally they are doused with water to create steam inside the lodge. The ceremony varies from tribe to tribe, but the point is spiritual renewal, bonding with nature, healing sickness, socializing, seeking guidance, or all of the above. Maybe we should learn to respect the act of sweating, in all of its elemental perfection. I rarely get sick in the summer. Do you?

Chewing Gum and Blogging at the Same Time

2009-05-29T20:24:00.011-06:00

Running like a pink, rubbery thread through the warp and woof of our history is chewing gum. Not just our history, actually. Gum-chewing--and before gum, there was resin, sap, and wax chewing--has been one of the most popular human habits for centuries. And who doesn't have childhood memories relating to chewing gum? Like buying square after square of that stale Bazooka Joe gum just to read or collect the not particularly funny comics wrapped around it? Or maybe you hoped they'd someday explain why Bazooka Joe always wore that black pirate eye patch and his friend always covered half his face with his red turtleneck shirt. Or did you ever feed pennies to a gumball machine like you were in Vegas, then put as many jumbo gumballs in your mouth as you could fit, and then blow a huge bubble that popped all over your face? Or did you fall asleep with gum in your mouth and wake up to find it tangled in your hair? Then the gum had to be cut out, leaving you to live through a "bad hair month." Or were you swung around in a game of "statues," which caused you to swallow your gum, and then some kid had to inform you that the gum would be stuck in your "stomach" for seven years? Or were you interrupted from a gum-chewing reverie by some teacher's (usually a P.E. teacher) voice demanding "spit out the gum, [insert last name here]"?

That was because gum-chewing was considered a vaguely disreputable, cow-like activity, especially in school. Which made it all the more enjoyable, judging from the evidence that has been stuck under every school desk and chair in the country. Amazingly, researchers have finally confirmed that gum-chewing actually improves test scores, helps you concentrate, releases pent-up hyperactivity, and relieves anxiety. So it's perfect for school kids. It has other benefits as well: helps curb snack cravings for sweets and other foods; exercises the jaw muscles; helps stop cigarette cravings; fights cavities; aids digestion; freshens breath; and keeps people from grinding their teeth, biting their nails, and chewing on pencils.

The Army has soldiers on night duty chew caffeine-laced gum to stay awake, especially while driving. Other additives to gum are dietary supplements like calcium, vitamins, green tea; pain relievers and other medications; and aphrodisiacs. By the way, swallowed gum is a little slow to pass through the digestive tract, but it does not take seven years! Gum is made from indigestible, insoluble plastic that lasts pretty much forever. That's why you see those flat, black, polka dots all over the pavement in every city and town. In Britain, a tax on gum goes toward paying the people whose job is to scrape gum off the sidewalks and streets (kids, don't drop out of high school, or that could be you!).

The saddest moment in the gum-chewing experience is when you realize that the flavor is gone.

My Sunglasses

2009-04-26T12:01:00.007-06:00

Like T. S. Eliot wrote, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Looking out at the painfully bright and demanding world as it glares back at you can be overwhelming. That’s why sunglasses rank among the greatest inventions ever. Human kind needs its shades. Hook the temples over your ears, allow the bridge to settle comfortably on your nose, then gaze out and relax. Ahhh, that’s much better.

About a century ago, silent-movie stars started the custom of wearing sunglasses, not to go incognito but because their eyes were damaged from spending long hours in front of bright lights. But we still think it’s cool to go out in sunglasses, hoping not to be recognized, as if we were celebrities concealing our identities from multitudes of fans. Wearing sunglasses is a convenient way to effectively hide without actually hiding anything but your eyes. Poker players love them. When you’ve got your shades on, nobody can intimidate you in a stare down or see that you’re looking off into the distance and not paying attention to some boring conversation.

Another advantage of wearing sunglasses is that you never know when you’re going to run into someone with a malevolent gaze. Best not to fall under the spell of somebody’s evil eye. Mutual eye contact between strangers automatically causes the exchange of hundreds of nonverbal messages and assessments at lightning speed, including the establishment of social rank when the submissive person lowers his eyes. Sunglasses short-circuit this two-way bombardment of information. However, one non-shaded glance can usually reveal someone’s kindness, trustworthiness, and even intelligence, among other qualities. Of course, some people’s eyes are naturally blank or mysterious, but everyone is hard to read when wearing dark sunglasses.

Then we have the mirror shades so favored by the members of the law enforcement profession ... the lenses are like a pair of big, fake, plastic eyes. When you automatically try to read behind the mirror glasses, your attempts are mocked by your own reflection. Between species, eye contact can be critical; for example, if you’re being challenged by an angry dog, the best thing to do is avert your eyes, because the dog will read human eye contact as a challenge to attack. A sleeping black dog might have light-colored “pumpkin seed” eyebrow spots over its eyes, which scare away predators like another pair of eyes. “Eyespots” on the wings of moths and butterflies might also scare off their attackers.

Being closely observed and scrutinized can make some people really nervous and self-conscious. Anytime that people look at you for longer than the normal time, it usually means they are either thinking about killing you or having sex with you (well, to put it more mildly, the observer is overgazing because of either aggression or attraction). Your mother was right: it is not polite to stare. It is bad manners to inspect someone as if he were a lab specimen!

In addition to screening out random eye contact and making people look cool, a good pair of sunglasses will also reflect or absorb harmful ultraviolet sun rays, which can burn the eyes and cause cataracts and other eye problems as we get older. So it’s true: human eyes cannot bear too much light.

The Elephant in the Room

2009-04-10T22:10:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

I Don't Know Why She Swallowed a Fly: Conscious Eating

2009-03-13T19:37:00.010-06:00

Did you ever see that annoying e-mail “forward” with a trivia list that includes this item: “every year the average person swallows four spiders in his sleep”? If you have arachnophobia, this information could make you panic. And even though the spider-eating urban myth is not true, in this culture, just the idea of eating insects makes the average person shudder in disgust.

We have eating habits, and that is just what they are: habits, as opposed to conscious behavior. But as food prices go up and available money goes down, we find ourselves altering a lot of our habits. One habit you might want to work on is wasting food. During this economic shake-up, the focus seems to be on greed--but waste, a fixable problem, is also to blame. Greed is when you want stuff you don’t have and can’t afford; waste is when you get stuff and then don’t use it. If it’s perishable, it rots, and you have to throw it away. How stupid is that? Basically, you have paid for your own garbage (in addition to having to pay someone to haul it away)!

We waste a lot of food. Now, I’m not recommending that we all gather in the town square each evening and make a pot of stone soup, but we could be a little bit better organized and flexible in our eating habits and choices. At one extreme, the practice of eating insects has actually been considered for environmental reasons by researchers (and for different reasons, by reality TV shows like Fear Factor). Thousands of insect species are edible and safe to eat, even if most of us couldn’t get one down our throats without gagging. But their protein, oils, carbohydrates, and minerals could be extracted and processed into an un-insectlike form like a powder (much like the way ground beef does not look like a cow). Other cultures eat insects all the time. In fact, we eat insects, too, without knowing it, and nothing terrible happens to us. We eat ground up beetles and other bugs that get milled with grains when they’re processed into flour. We eat tiny insects we can’t see in our fruit, vegetables, juice, and other foods. Unlike the spider myth, these are true facts!

Like I said, eating insects intentionally is the extreme cutting edge of radical dietary reform. But if you’re not interested in eating from the bottom of the food chain, then maybe you could just become a more conscious eater and food buyer. I can’t believe how often, at restaurants, after diners leave, I’ve seen waiters carrying off nearly full plates of uneaten expensive food. Restaurants and fast-food places usually don’t allow their employees or anyone else to eat even unserved food that has not sold. Grocery stores, bakeries, and outdoor markets throw away tons of unsold food too. I don’t know all the reasons and laws and regulations behind all this waste, but if ways to redistribute this cast-off food can’t be found, then at least in our homes we can be less wasteful.

If you often throw away spoiled produce, consider buying frozen fruits and vegetables instead. At least they don’t rot before you use them, and the inedible leaves, stems, etc. have been cut away, and you’re not paying for inedible bruised pieces either. Plan your weekly meals before shopping but also be flexible in your food consumption so your refrigerator is almost empty before you shop again. The more nonperishable food you buy, the less you throw away; for example, peanut butter is more practical than cream cheese or cheese (and also safer to pack in a lunch). Raisins last longer than grapes. Look at expiration dates before you buy milk and meat and other foods to avoid having to throw them away unused.

Another way to break out of a dysfunctional relationship to food is to try fasting once in a while. Several religions prescribe fasting on certain days or months. Some fast until sunset, then eat. Maybe the fasting is to increase gratitude for the abundant food they have, or to feel empathy for others who go hungry, or to experience a spiritual awakening, or to detoxify the body. Whatever the religious or personal reasons are for going without food, the discipline of fasting has a lot of advantages. The main one is to break the habit of eating three meals a day whether you’re hungry or not. When you fast, you have the opportunity to reflect on your eating habits and what they are doing to your finances, the environment, your health, and your appearance. It makes a lot of sense to only eat when you’re hungry. And to stop eating before you’re full and groaning and clutching your gut. Save leftovers. You will actually find, after a long fast, that your body quickly adjusts to less food or to lighter food, and you might realize that you habitually eat too much or that you eat too mindlessly!

A Balancing Act or Quadruped Locomotion?

2009-02-21T20:20:00.005-06:00

It’s been an icy winter, and I know a few people who have slipped on the ice and broken some bones this year. Now, this kind of accident wouldn’t happen if we walked on all fours. Maintaining these upright postures involves constant work, and some people have more trouble than others, with keeping their balance.

Some of us are very fond of having level, solid ground beneath our two feet. You will not catch us on skateboards, roller skates, skis, trampolines, boats, bleachers, high places, or even staircases, if we can avoid them. These things make us dizzy, nauseous, and anxious, even panicky. People like this used to be labeled “uncoordinated,” but now there are cooler, more clinical terms for what we have, like “gravitational insecurity” and “sensory integration dysfunction.”

Your brain, senses, muscles, and nerves are constantly communicating to control your sense of balance, while monitoring your surroundings for any threats to that equilibrium. Every second, you have to be aware of your orientation in space, making changes in your body position if necessary, if possible (sometimes you’re free-falling or upside-down!). An internal alarm goes off for you to adjust, whenever one of the monitoring system’s readings goes out of range. People with gravitational insecurity tend to get alarmed sometimes even when there is no real danger of falling (on staircases, for example). Their strong preference for being seated and not in motion can be due to visual defects or to undiagnosed or uncorrectable problems with the rotational or gravity sensors in their inner ears, among other causes.

Many of you probably just take for granted that when you stand or walk, your body is performing a miraculous balancing act. Not everyone is so lucky: A few years ago, a rural family in Turkey was reported to have three children born with such poor muscle coordination and balance that they have never been able to stand upright. These children walk, but on all fours, on their palms and on their feet, with legs straightened. Two more of their siblings occasionally walk upright, with bent knees and tilted heads, but, more often, they just use quadruped locomotion too.

Imagine if the rest of us walked on all fours: With three backup support units instead of just one, we wouldn’t fall down when we stumbled. It would be fun to walk--and intentionally slide--on ice. Wheeeee! We could run faster, by leaps and bounds. We could also walk farther, with four cylinders going instead of just two, before getting tired. We would not have lower back problems from pressure on the lower vertebrae, or hernias. How many of our other health problems are caused by our upright posture? I wonder if our relatively difficult childbirths are caused by the pelvis having to be so thick to support our weight, thus making the birth canal smaller. When I watched my cat give birth, the kittens just slid right out. Sometimes I envy our four-legged friends.

Chocoholics Anonymous

2009-02-15T16:17:00.011-06:00

I hate to tell you this as you’re poking at your Valentine chocolates, trying to find out what’s in their centers before wolfing them down, but chocolate is not a food--it’s a drug. You have to be suspicious of any substance that’s toxic to dogs, when they can survive drinking from murky puddles and toilets and eating mysterious debris from the ground and the trash can. Two one-ounce squares of baker’s chocolate, the most toxic variety, can poison a twenty-pound dog. It would take four to six chocolate bars to produce any adverse effects, such as vomiting, in that same dog. Ingesting excessive amounts of the stimulants in chocolate can cause a dog to experience cardiac distress, seizures, coma, and even death.

Chocolate is not the only so-called food that contains psychoactive substances, but it’s one of the more popular ones. The typical American person (not dog) consumes 11.5 pounds of chocolate each year. People love stimulants--coffee, tea, cola, and Mountain Dew, but often don't realize that chocolate contains caffeine. Of course, it also smells great, comes in cute shapes, combines the prime taste combination of butter and sugar, and melts in your mouth--but the problem is how you feel the day after you indulge.

The way chocolate is peddled to consumers (especially on holidays) and doled out freely to young children should definitely be curtailed! If you crave chocolate on a daily basis and get moody or suffer from migraines when you miss a day, then you should stop eating it! Admit that you’re addicted to chocolate. It contains not just caffeine but three kinds of stimulant drugs that can affect brain chemistry and moods, the heart, and the lungs. If you suffer from anxiety, depression, irritability, mood swings, sleep problems, increased pulse rate, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excessive tiredness, headaches, asthma, or migraines, then try doing without those candy bars, brownies, chocolate cake, and cocoa. See if your mood improves dramatically or your chronic headaches stop. Give yourself at least a week to detoxify and to start feeling better, because first, those negative symptoms will show up during the withdrawal period. Since you might feel better when you have another candy bar, rarely do you blame your bad mood and physical problems on the chocolate you ate a day or two earlier, mainly because you think of chocolate as a food, not a drug!

Of course, not everyone is intolerant of chocolate. It’s been around for centuries, is popular worldwide, and cocoa beans were even used as money at one time! But take notice of how much chocolate you’ve been eating, if you feel bad a few days after you stop eating it, and if some of your psychological or physical problems disappear after a few weeks without chocolate. And never feed chocolate to your dog.

Another Trip around the Sun

2009-01-25T09:11:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

When Worlds Collide: Man vs. Goose

2009-01-18T22:03:00.005-06:00

You know the scenario: someone’s driving along at 55 mph on cruise control, radio blasting, and he hits a deer. He damages his car, maybe gets hurt, and usually kills the deer. Somehow, people think that if they’re the ones who build the roads and drive inside the protective shell of their vehicles, then they have the right of way against deer. But how can a deer know that it’s endangering both cars and itself when it crosses the hard surface we humanoids call a road? If you always watch for deer as you drive, you can save a deer’s life as well as some money on your insurance premium and a trip to the body shop. Think outside the car.

When animals collide with manmade machines, disasters can happen. As you probably know, a plane made a miraculously safe emergency landing in the Hudson River last week, after colliding with a flock of geese that crippled both of its engines at takeoff. It did seem that the news focus was on the geese being in the way of the plane instead of the other way around. We should be aware that, like David bringing down Goliath, a twelve-pound Canada goose (or usually several) can still crash a mighty jet. Even though we usually travel inside protective armors of one kind or another, we aren’t immune from fatal interactions with other species (and objects--remember the Titanic) in the air, land, and water.

I wonder how a goose considers the oversized flying metal objects it has to share the sky with. When geese or gulls or other birds on a runway venture too close to a plane, they can and do, unfortunately, get sucked into the engine. In fact, airplane engines generate enough force to suck up anything in their paths including ground crew. Thousands of bird strikes happen every year, but most only damage the geese.

Not that Canada geese are all sweetness and light or anything. First of all, if you think the sound a bird makes is a song, think again. Geese honk, and I wouldn’t call it a pretty noise. It reminds me of those silver bicycle horns with the squeezable rubber balls. Or a cross between a kazoo and a yelping puppy. Geese also contaminate lakes and have been known to attack people. To guard their ground-level nests, a few geese act as sentinels. A threatened goose can be aggressive. It might stretch its neck toward you, pump its head up and down, stick out its tongue, and hiss. If you don’t back off, it might charge at you and clamp down with its toothed bill and then beat you with its wings. No kidding, and some weigh as much as eighteen pounds.

But Canada geese are rather amazing too. They can fly as fast as 70 mph (usually more like 50 mph), migrating without air traffic controllers or navigational machines, often covering about 250 miles per day. Even fighter pilots have copied the trademark V-shaped flight formation that geese use for more efficient flying as they glide in the updraft of the bird ahead, taking turns being the leader. If a flock spots some other geese dining in a field below, the birds might swoop down for a food break. Sometimes those feeding geese turn out to be decoys. Foiled again.

Wolf and Coyote against the Constellations

2009-01-01T16:53:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Bearpolar

2009-01-01T16:49:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Annus Horribilis: Count Down to 2009!

2008-12-27T13:07:00.007-06:00

The year 2008 sucked--on the global, national, local, and personal levels. For example, I lost my dog, my cat, a longtime treasured friend, and 25 percent of my mutual fund. I had to adjust to my daughter going off to college. I’m sure many of you could list worse setbacks than these, both on the personal sphere and beyond.

But as far as the crude materialistic loss of investment money goes--which is really just a lower number printed on a piece of mail each month--they promise it will increase again. Many chart their lives by this belief in decrease followed by increase, or Change, symbolized by the yin-yang symbol. You can regard time in any shape you choose. Mindset is all about geometry: the arrangements of the points, lines, angles, and shapes on Earth (“geo”) in your imagination.

You can see a year in your life, for example, as a timeline from January to December. Or you can see a year as a calendar with numbers and boxes and lines; each new month, you tear off the old month’s page and throw it away. At the end of the year, you toss the whole calendar year into the trash and start with a clean slate. Or you can visualize the year as a complete orbit around the Sun, with automatic closure. We all travel together as one, on this spinning ball of dirt through space, and the annual trip ends at a certain distance and angle from the Sun, at the place where it started about 365 days before; I like to think of the year that way.

So, the last day of the year is like the bittersweet end of a year-long trip full of ups and downs, and it’s always a relief to come back home to Square One and restart my life. To go back to the financial analogy, which seems to be the style these days, I like to think we get a “fresh start," which is actually a legal term in the Bankruptcy Code, meaning “reorganize to be free of all debts.” I like to think that we travel around the track of a year, recording notes and leaving marks like on a navigator’s log. But at the end of the year, when we start afresh, I like to think that those records of the year before are erased as they are replaced with a new story, of a new year.

Even though January 1st is sort of a random place to start, I like the way it seems to make people collectively optimistic at this time of year. They make resolutions. They fix their eyes on the road ahead. They regroup. The darkness moves into the light. One of the most important beliefs to hold onto is the secret of momentum: to choose hope over despair, no matter how bad things seem at any given moment. No matter how bad the past has been, a new deal is coming around. Pick up your cards, and see how lucky you can be in 2009 ...

Looking at the Camera

2008-12-25T11:12:00.004-06:00

collage by Joanna Key
(originally published on the cover of the journal Karamu)

Blame the Economy on Those Perpetual Brats

2008-11-23T17:12:00.003-06:00

Why is our economy melting down? Well, one possible contributing reason is that everyday functioning has gotten way too convenient and abstract, mainly because of technology. When everything, including stock market trading, is at your fingertips instantly, you turn into a brat. There’s no such thing as deliberation anymore. Consequences? They don’t matter. Impatience and impulsivity rule.

To fuel our impatience, we have e-mail, instant messaging, texting, and faxing for instant feedback and communication. We can watch online movies, download any song, and take digital photos and send them anywhere. We get fast food and other purchases from drive-thru windows, and shop using credit cards online for anything we want, with one click of the mouse. Two days later, there’s a plop on the doorstep, and a new toy has arrived! We’re the microwave generation, and we’re getting more impatient all the time. If our computer screens take more than a few seconds to download, we start tapping our nails on the desk and prodding the keys. This damn DSL is too slow.

Along with impatience comes impulsivity. Spending Under the Influence of impulsivity has always been a dangerous risk. That’s because you’re acting on impulse rather than thought. You’re not thinking before you act. You’re not thinking about what problems you will cause after you act. Impulsive behavior is said to max out in the early teenage years. But I think a lot of people are just acting as if they are permanently stuck in that adolescent stage--you find these perpetual brats everywhere. They want it, and they want it now. Put a credit card in their hands, and they go to town. It’s really easy. Why wait until you can actually afford something before buying it? Financial transactions too closely resemble games. So convenient, and exciting too. Nothing serious going on here. Swipe a debit card. Type in your credit card number. And it’s yours!

Buying has gotten way too abstract. You don’t have to find a hammer and break the piggy bank anymore. You don’t have to wait in line and then fish out a wad of bills from your wallet and surrender them to a cash register drawer. That ancient custom, paying cash, used to drive home the fact that you were losing something when you spent money. Now it’s more like you are punching in a secret but meaningless code that will magically earn you whatever you want to have. It’s almost as if we believe that the stuff we buy is free. The brats are playing a game, and they think they are winning just because it’s been painless so far, and they have lots of neat stuff they bought on credit.

Sometimes buying with cash just might make us more responsible. Sometimes doing things the slow way, the hard way, is the best strategy to keep regrettable actions from catching up with you in the guise of disastrous consequences. You can fill the extra time by actually thinking about what you are doing! Do I really to need to buy this? Will I be bored with it by next week? Can I afford it? Why I am I buying it in the first place? Maybe I already have one? Can I borrow one or buy it used? Can I live without it?

To modify Mitch Ratliffe’s quote about computers: Impulse buying “lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.”

she gets you on her wavelength

2008-11-21T07:18:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

The Trouble with Trick-or-Treat

2008-10-31T15:00:00.003-06:00

I’m a Halloween scrooge. Well, one year was sort of fun, when two friends and I dressed up as a three-headed monster. We were all in the same foil-covered cardboard box from our necks to our waists, with our three antenna-covered heads poking out of holes at the top and our six legs enclosed in two oversized pant-legs below. I was the tallest, so I had to be in the middle to balance the box, and I also lost the use of my arms for the night. Another year I was lazy and just threw a white sheet over myself at the last minute and went out trick-or-treating as a ghost. The eye-holes were in the wrong place, and I couldn’t really see and kept bumping into people, tripping over things, and holding out my candy bag in the wrong direction. I’d rather be myself, not in costume, because it’s easier.

The whole concept of people walking around and knocking on my door, begging, in costumes and masks and especially in scary costumes just creeps me out. I guess it’s because I think people can be scary enough without costumes. And people that I know, on this day, will be standing right in front of me in disguise, and I don’t even recognize them--that’s another primal fear of mine, I guess, when familiar people morph into monsters! I know I’m not alone in this aversion to Halloween. Most dogs and babies hate costumes, too, and babies and dogs are my gurus. Once I made a papier-mache coyote head about three times the normal head size. When I put on this head-mask (the eye-holes were in the neck) and walked around town, babies started to cry and dogs growled at me ferociously. I’m not sure if it was the sight of the oversized dog that scared them or, in the case of the dogs, the overwhelming sensory conflict where they saw a coyote but smelled a human. Halloween is just too confusing for some of us.

Halloween actually started out as a celebration to mark the day when animals were brought in from the pastures to their warm stables for the winter. The darkness descended with the cold, and people used to imagine all sorts of eerie things. Like that this night, All Hallow’s Eve, was when the spirits of people who have died would return, either to protect them or to haunt them. Coins and food treats were left outside to maintain the goodwill of the ghosts. People were also afraid that vengeful, angry spirits would damage their houses (and “T-P” their trees?). A hollowed-out gourd with a sinister, candlelit face was carved and set outside to frighten away the evil-intentioned demons. So that’s how we ended up with this holiday. But sometimes fun isn’t really all that much fun.

The Walk of Life

2008-09-23T20:44:00.004-06:00

I went on a walk with a deer the other evening. I walked around a hill and saw her standing there, frozen in place, assessing my danger level from about ten yards away. I didn’t want to approach any nearer, so I turned to walk away. The doe walked in the same direction. We walked this way, in parallel formation and watching each other, for the whole length of a long field. Like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, when I stopped, she stopped. When I started again, she also resumed. Then some people approached on the jogging trail, and she bolted off into the woods.

If you were to film your life from a low-flying plane, you’d notice the choreography of your daily movements. We don’t move randomly; we move in relation to others. A sense of responsibility toward a loosely defined special group is something you carry with you all the time, like a GPS tracking device in your mind, usually set with coordinates for kids, family, friends, pets, or whomever. We follow their lives relative to our own. We’re on call. If you get divorced, or lose a dog, a cat, a relative, or a friend, or you move, or your children grow up and leave home, then you reset your tracking device. Reset your orbit.

When you become a homeowner, you take on another kind of responsibility. I really don’t know how the American dream of becoming a homeowner got started. These days, it’s more of a nightmare than ever. Things fall apart in a house on a regular basis. Grass grows. Paint peels. Plumbing fails. Heaters die. Roofs leak. Windows stick. Carpets wear out. Appliances break down. Then there are natural disasters, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and high winds that can wreck your house in a minute. These phenomena would be kind of interesting and even exciting, if you didn’t have to worry about your house getting damaged. You can flee, but your house has to take the blows.

If owning a home actually is that much cheaper, I’d be glad to hand over the difference to some landlord as payment for him to worry about all of the above instead of me! Does anyone add up the true sticker price of a new home after the bank tacks on interest for the loan? And homeowner’s insurance, expensive maintenance, and rising property taxes, too, of course. Buying a home also means that you’re more likely to plant yourself somewhere and start accumulating and hoarding a lot of possessions that are much harder to unload than to gather. People used to be nomadic so they wouldn’t deplete the resources in any one area as well.

Although we so enthusiastically and routinely surrender it, mobility could be our greatest freedom--but rarely is it random. Are all our movements as imperceptibly fixed as the Earth’s orbit around the Sun? Will we lockstep with an army or an aerobics class or a partner? Will we walk with a dog or push someone’s stroller or wheelchair? Will we depend on engines and wheels or wings and traffic patterns to decide where we move and when we stop and go? Your life is whatever pulls you in the next direction. But if you were to film the Earth from a high-flying plane, there’s a point at which all the movement stops.

Practiced at the Art of Deception

2008-09-08T18:34:00.007-06:00

Speaking of strange presidential campaigns, in 1932, FDR, whose legs were paralyzed, felt compelled to conceal the fact while campaigning, that he could neither stand nor walk without assistance! He won the election and went on to serve four terms as U.S. president, guiding the country through the Great Depression and WWII, the whole time somehow hiding his inability to get around effortlessly like the average non-paraplegic citizen.

When making public appearances, standing and walking short distances were carefully planned but exhausting struggles for FDR, with heavy steel braces on his legs, a cane, and a constant group of escorts to discreetly assist him. He would speak publicly sometimes from a convertible outfitted with a sturdy bar he could use to hoist himself into a standing position. To navigate stairs, two bodyguards would carry him upright at the elbows, managing the illusion that the president was climbing or descending on his own. Amazingly, compared to the dirt-digging media now, the press agreed to go along with the cover-up by strategically shutting off cameras and almost never photographing him in the wheelchair he used in private.

The irony of this cover-up is twofold: In the most extreme way possible, the truth of FDR’s life would have busted any myth of the “disabled” as underachievers. But, still, FDR’s perceived need to publicly conceal his inability to easily walk or stand becomes a sad fact of history. Although, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA 1990) about a half-century later finally, and so belatedly, demanded that the environment be made user-friendly for everyone, the stigma against disabilities, whether obvious, subtle, or hidden, remains. Accommodations are now being made, ramps and elevators and handrails installed, etc., but there still seems to persist a bizarre insistence by the general public that “disabilities” are something to hide and look down upon. We have a long way to go before we all really get it, deep down, that nobody is perfect.

What is a “disability”? The word is way too negative and should be replaced. It implies that someone might be limited, impaired, hindered, disadvantaged, weak, incapable, the banned “handicapped,” damaged, functionally defective, or less than whole! The focus is too much on what a person can’t do, as if everybody else can and so just try to blend in and keep up.

The ADA bans discrimination against anyone who varies from the typical person in their mobility, or physical, mental, or sensory functioning. People with learning differences, neurological deviations, serious medical conditions or medication side-effects, and those recovering from drug and alcohol addictions are also protected under the ADA. People with anxiety, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar, or those on the autism spectrum (now up to between 3 and 6 per 1000, I believe), among other conditions, are also covered. That defines a lot of the people you know, although you might not be aware of their issues. You, yourself, might be eligible for accommodations by the ADA and not even know it.

I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to privacy. It’s just that so much wasted effort is spent pretending to be “normal” when we don’t all have to be expected to do everything in a seemingly effortless manner. If fewer “disabilities” were concealed, then more people could gain support and feel pride and acceptance. More accommodations would be asked for, and more choices would be given. People could relax and accept their uniqueness. Teachers and workplace supervisors could spare people humiliation, frustration, and the perceived need for medication in some cases.

Deaf culture is a great example of pride and support: Members of the deaf community who learn American Sign Language can fully communicate with no problem in their own language, whereas hearing aids, lip-reading, and speaking are usually inadequate and tiring. Why struggle endlessly to fit into the hearing world and pretend to understand speech that you can’t hear?

We need to be more aware that anyone around us might be struggling mightily with the activities we find effortless and perform automatically. I’m talking about the more obvious--walking, getting around, seeing, and speaking--but also hearing, reading, writing, doing math, learning, concentrating, remembering, comprehending, giving speeches or performing, socializing, screening out environmental stimuli, problem-solving, following instructions, driving, traveling, performing manual tasks, lifting, riding in an elevator, going out to dine or shop, and caring for oneself. The ADA was an amazing breakthrough, but we still need to open up more doors by preventing the constantly feared humiliation that goes along with concealing the truth and trying to fit in. So often, it’s the attitude and inflexibility of the outside world that is a way bigger problem than any so-called disability!

The Animal That Swallows Itself

2008-08-14T21:46:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Wanna Know a Secret? (scratch, scratch)

2008-08-01T16:46:00.010-06:00

How completely uncool is it to announce that you hate a plant? But I can’t help it; poison ivy is a terrible, horrible scourge that effectively ruins my ability to freely commune with nature for most of the year, in the Midwest at least! BUT--for after you have fallen victim to this blight in the forest--there IS a little-known cure for the itch.

I’m not alone when I say that I hate poison ivy. The way it pops up in new places every spring, spreading its evil tentacles for 20 feet or more under ground. The way it’s not satisfied to just grow on the ground of nearly every forest and field I want to hike on--but it has to also creep up trees and buildings as a vine, to loom menacingly overhead. And, most of all, I hate what happens to your skin in a sneaky delayed reaction after you contact poison ivy--intense itching torture night and day, an ugly, conspicuous rash that lasts for weeks, fluid-filled blisters, and even scars. The offending substance, an oily sap, is found in the leaves, stems, and roots of the plant, so you can “get” poison ivy even in the winter (although not as easily) when the leaves have finally shriveled up and died. Of course, the smart thing to do is to imprint the appearance of poison ivy unmistakably onto your memory--and then always be alert to avoid it when you are walking outside, even in your own backyard. But, if you slip up and are greeted by a red bump one morning ...

After a few rounds of Posion Ivy Hell in my lifetime, I finally read (in Mother Earth News, May/June 1989 issue) about an unlikely-sounding way to stop the poison ivy itch--for free. It worked like magic, and I want to spread the word! Does this sound like something you’d hear from a daytime talk show guest? Well, you have nothing to lose by trying it. YOU CAN STOP THE IRRITATION OF THE POISON-IVY RASH BY A PROCESS CALLED “BRINGING OUT THE ITCH”! You simply run the itchy area under water that is as hot as you can tolerate (obviously, you build up to this temperature gradually so you don’t scald your skin) for about 30 seconds. Under the hot water, the itch gets stronger and more intense, then it peaks, and suddenly there is just a nice tingly feeling where there used to be an irritating itch. You should be itch-free for around six or eight hours after that.

Why the medical profession ignores this remedy is a mystery to me. Or not.

Here’s a quasi-scientific explanation if you require that sort of backup when something sounds too good to be true. “Heat releases histamine, the substance in the skin that causes intense itching. Therefore, a hot shower will cause intense itching as the histamine is being released.... This process will deplete the cells of histamine, and the patient will obtain up to eight hours of relief from itching.” http://www.drkoop.com/encyclopedia/93/395.html

Notes from a College Town

2008-07-12T10:03:00.005-06:00

There’s a joke about how graduate school is the snooze button on the alarm clock of life. Both the graduate and undergraduate college years are where you are groomed for your real life, which is still then maybe two, four, or six years off in the future. Then, more than any other time in your life, your today is all about your tomorrow; the present is sacrificed like a newborn calf bred and raised only to become someone’s veal dinner. What is the consequence of living, even for two, four, or six years, flying in a holding pattern, hovering over the future, circling the runway, not yet cleared for landing? Well, a student might talk a lot about his plans when he’s up in the air, as if the professional self he imagines is more real than who he is right now. If Bob Dylan was in on the conversation, he’d say, “Someday everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody. When I paint my masterpiece.”

Preparing for a career at college is like using training wheels or playing T-ball--it’s a safe and easy way to practice and rehearse for the real world. That is, before you’ll have to rely on your own balance to keep going. Before you develop a good eye and good timing to fend off whatever’s pitched your way. What happens when you have a big group of people, “the student body,” like a horde of rodents, just on the verge of joining the rat race? College towns have this atmosphere of suspended reality. But people have differing relationships with gravity. Some prefer, or even insist on, the solid ground of the here-and-now. The college campus is not the best growth medium for everyone. As someone who has lived way too many years of her life in college towns, both as an on-and-off student and a non-student, I can say that we need to consider more job-shadowing and internship plans or we should revive the apprenticeship system for the many people who don’t “take” to college. In the Middle Ages, a person in his early teens would go and live with a master in a chosen field and get on-the-job training in exchange for cheap labor for many years, learning a craft by immersing himself in the work.

In college, those of us who flounder at the idea of abstract concepts like “the future” are soon distinguished from those who are able to navigate like migratory birds toward the unknown target of their professional lives. Some people decide on a career in high school, train for it in college, and get hired in their field after graduation, and are often perfectly happy. But these neat stages leading to a possible future make no sense at all to many others. So, in college towns, you also find the perpetual student who collects degrees, switches majors every year, or drops out. He tends to eventually return to living his life in the present, using the hands-on approach to education and to discovering his identity.

But both kinds of students, the directed ones and the drifters, get to land in the real world at some point. Away from dorms, registration, textbooks, assignments, midterms, grades, credits, desks, lectures, and that unbelievably slow, big white clock. They move on--unless they happen to settle in a college town; in that case, they will be doomed to live to the rhythm of the semesters forever. It reminds me of that movie Groundhog Day--like every year, somehow, no matter what you do or who you become, you are forced to experience, even as an outsider, the cycles of college, over and over. Here comes the big influx in the fall, the sudden stillness of spring break, the great exodus for summer ... living among a transient population of unfairly attractive young people who live on pizza and Mountain Dew and try out their wings. And then they leave you behind, in college-town limbo forever.

Should I Quit My Habit?

2008-07-03T21:35:00.003-06:00

We have these lives, our lives, and some days we find ourselves in places we don’t want to be. Sometimes we are sitting and biding time through painfully boring unchosen activities (like a lecture course or a three-day drive along barren interstate highways), and sometimes we’re stressing out and anxious during involuntary situations (like living or working with mean people or getting lost in a strange city). In fact, starting with infancy, between feeding, sleeping, and the joy of discovering a New World, there are a lot of either very boring, frustrating periods (stuck in a crib, strapped into a car seat, or wedged into a high chair, unable to walk or crawl) or stressful, miserable unchosen situations (crying for everything because you’re basically helpless). Babies can’t do much, but, out of necessity, most of them figure out ways to self-comfort because other people can’t comfort them 24 hours a day. So, every time you see a baby, it has either its hands or something else in its mouth. It must have figured out that these two things, later to be identified as hands, were always right there in front of it.

This never changes (no amputee jokes here, please): you look down, wherever you are throughout your lifespan, and you always see something familiar--your hands. Your fingernails with their white half-moons, the dead epidermis of your cuticles, the mysterious roadmap of your palm lines, the duck webs between your spread fingers, your rings, wrinkles, veins, writer’s calluses, freckles, and scars. You don’t know anything better than your hands, not even your face.

So, when there’s nothing else to do until you’re no longer idling or getting frazzled, why not bite your nails? A lot of people bite their nails throughout their lifetimes, usually when they’re either understimulated or overstimulated, and the nail-biting is a convenient self-comforting habit--much like the tendency of caged birds to pick at their feathers. Birds and humans both can take compulsive nervous, restless grooming habits to the pathological extreme of self-mutilation (google “trichotillomania” or read about caged birds eating their own toes!), but I’m talking about everyday fidgety nail-biting. Then there’s, of course, the next step--cigarette smoking, so wildly popular, in spite of decades of surgeon generals’ warnings. Obviously, smoking is just a bit less convenient and a lot more dangerous and expensive, yet more enjoyable, than nail-biting.

Should you stop your habit? Let me answer that indirectly with an old joke.

A police officer pulls over a car after it runs a stop sign. The driver asks, “What’s the problem, Officer? There aren’t any cars out on the road this late at night, and I can see clearly in all directions. I slowed down, looked both ways, and I drove slowly, still looking, through the intersection! What’s the difference if I just slowed down or if I came to a full stop?” The police officer, angry, pulls open the guy’s car door and drags him out of the car. He then starts to beat him with his nightstick, shouting, “The difference is this: would you like me to slow down or would you like me to stop?”

By the end of the joke, you’re supposed to side with the officer, but, really, the driver is right (although not legally, of course). Why stop completely when just slowing down is perfectly okay? There’s a big righteous movement in our culture to entirely quit habits like nail-biting and smoking, but we don’t respect that these behaviors have served the lifelong purpose of self-pacifying. It would be nice to avoid all boring and stressful situations, but we can’t. No pun intended, but “It takes a nail to drive out a nail.” If you can find something else that is just as convenient (good luck), to substitute for your fingernails (or for your cigarettes, if you’ve gone on to become addicted to smoking), then you can stop one self-comforting habit and start another. We develop habits to keep our lives (our nervous systems, to be exact) in balance. People are constantly trying to relax when stressed or anxious and to be stimulated when bored and restless. So should you stop nail-biting (or should you stop smoking, cold turkey)? No. But should you avoid tedium and excessive pressure, so you can cut back on these habits--so you can slow down before they become too damaging? Yes!

my north, my south, my east and west

2008-06-14T15:04:00.002-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Forgiveness Is a Two-Faced Word

2008-06-09T14:24:00.005-06:00

Named after the two-faced Roman god, a Janus word is a

self-contradictory word, known as a contronym or an antagonym. A Janus word is actually its own opposite.

That boy left.
Only that boy is left.

That horse can run fast.
That color is fast, and will not run.

Dust the cake with powdered sugar.
Dust the shelf.

A word that has been bandied about for centuries by various religions and now by self-help gurus and popular culture, forgiveness has been twisted into a contronym too. Forgiveness has two opposing meanings.

My forgiveness can mean that whatever you did is not okay with me, but after a while, you will be pardoned. I will let you off the hook. I will excuse you and give you the opportunity for better behavior. Then we can reconnect as two people who trust each other.

Or forgiveness can mean that what you did is so not okay with me that I need to, for my own peace of mind, disengage or at least distance myself from the memory and stop dwelling on the incident. We as two people will separate forever with no possibility of reconciliation.

Forgiveness is supposed to be the grandest gesture a soul can make on its way to eternal blessedness. Well, news flash: You can’t just decide to forgive someone like you decide to sweep a floor. You can’t just say the words “I forgive you,” and abracadabra, the slate is clean.

What the religions and self-help culture do not get is that a person forgives from the gut, not the mind. Trust is visceral. People are designed for survival. If you are injured, physically or mentally, you will always be defensive toward whatever injured you, or even toward anything resembling that perpetrator. The organism protects itself automatically. So you can’t really decide with your mind, which of the opposite kinds of forgiveness, if any, will be granted.

Forgiveness should not be so widely advertised; it’s a concept that’s bigger than we are. The main point is that forgiveness should not indicate that something wrong is now right. If a person who has been hurt can rise above the negativity or disconnect from an involvement, then maybe it’s healthier to just move forward and not undo the healing process and risk giving someone another chance--that might be another chance to hurt you.

Graduation: Do You Care?

2008-05-21T09:54:00.005-06:00

It’s graduation season, the time for commencement speeches. I have this on my mind because my daughter graduated from high school last week, and between the “Pomp and Circumstance” processional and the tossing in the air of the caps and the silly string, there were the speeches, mixed with advice and nostalgia.

The most important advice I can think of for my daughter and her friends is “Be Careful.” I do mean that in the traditional sense of not leading needlessly short, reckless, accident–prone lives, but I mean it more in the sense of “Focus” --literally, be careful, or be “full of care.”

Overscheduling your life tends to prevent you from caring and focusing. And deliberately overworking employees seems to be something that companies are proud of. How many interviews include this question: “Are you good at multitasking?” “NO,” I want to scream in reply. “I want to be assigned one job at a time, to work at with concern, uninterrupted, from start to finish!” Whatever is right in front of you deserves your undivided attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with care; empty your mind of distractions and give your work the time it requires--which is not always predictable.

To care means to give loving attention to the needs of the outside world, instead of just being wrapped up in your own life all the time. To care means to not just go through the motions, trying to get something done. Be careful, because doing your work well does matter to someone, even if it doesn’t seem so important to you at the time. I edit books for a living, and, even when I’m editing something like biopharmaceutical statistics, I try to edit that article to as close to perfection as I can, because somebody cared about that subject enough to write about it, and somebody else will care about it enough to read it; it matters to them so it matters to me. Or if you cook for people, always be thinking about food safety, so that nobody gets sick from your meal. Or if you become a doctor, take time with each individual patient. Observe and listen carefully, so you can make the best decisions, as that person places his or her life in your hands.

And, finally, be careful with people’s feelings. Harsh words, carelessly spoken, can lodge forever, like a bullet too close to the heart to take out. If somebody--friends, family, pets, or strangers--needs something from you, then drop your routine, drop your multitasking, and give them your undivided attention. Attention is love. Do you care?

There's Been a Funnel-Cloud Spotted

2008-04-17T18:24:00.004-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

If you’re a drama queen who has just been involuntarily landlocked on the bleak prairies of the Midwest, don’t worry. There are still plenty of opportunities here for disaster to totally and completely ruin your life. We get our thrills here from inclement weather--in every shape and form.

We get tornados that could turn your house into a game of pick-up-sticks. We get fog so thick you can barely see your outstretched hand. We get flash floods that seep through your walls and create an indoor swimming pool in your basement. We get black ice on the roads that causes even the salt trucks to spin out. We get snow days, where the snowplows take over the streets like tanks, to battle the elements. We get triple-digit heat waves where old people without air-conditioners are taken to cool shelters. We get humidity that makes even the walls sweat. We get howling, limb-snapping winds and hail the size of golf balls. We get the thunderbird flapping his wings. We learn that lightning can strike the same spot twice. We get droughts where we just watch the corn die a little more every day.

In the Midwest, talking about the weather is not the lowest common denominator of conversational topics! In fact, something strange happens here that most people take for granted. Most of us watch the weather reports every day (or get on the Internet weather Web sites obsessively), and then, ask just about anybody, and he or she will tell you what’s going to happen with the weather tomorrow. Or the next day. Or even further into the future. We are prophesiers--well, thanks to the meteorologists--and foretelling the future is pretty darn close to practicing magic, if you ask me! It can be a beautiful sunny day, but someone will tell you not to go sailing because a strong front is moving in from the west. Disaster averted. We have the power to prevent property loss, financial ruin, injuries, and fatalities.

Between centuries of folklore and decades of technology, we know what’s coming weather-wise before it arrives. Well, we care more about the bad forecasts than the good ones, of course. The high degree of accuracy of weather forecasts is due to weather balloons, satellites, computers, and radar. We can watch the weather to the west and measure the wind speed and direction and the barometric pressure. We can monitor arthritis and migraines or take note of a red sky in the morning--all of this means we can predict the future. That is really sort of amazing. Is there a ring around the moon? Are the bees swarming? Are the fish in a feeding frenzy? Can you see the stars? Are the clouds wispy and high like mare’s tails or like mackerel scales, or are they piling up like mirages of mountains shaped like warts? Has a cloud landed on Earth like a spaceship made of fog? Or are the clouds dark and ominous and moving in fast like green war ships--that brings me to tornadoes.

Now that is one disaster we are still pretty much blindsided by. The most unstable of weather systems, a tornado touchdown can only be predicted about twenty minutes in advance. Finding a basement, interior room, closet, or piece of heavy furniture and hunkering down is about the best you can do. Tornadoes are short-lived, at least. Writer Michael Ventura tells this story about his brother:
“There was a tornado warning. ... His roommate, terribly afraid, said, ‘Al, I've prayed to God to protect us from the tornado.’
‘You're praying to the same guy who sent the tornado,’ laughed Al.”

LOL: Inarticulate Snort of the Heart

2008-03-21T20:37:00.006-06:00

You breathe in, you breathe out, day in and day out. What’s to break the monotony of THAT? Well, actually, 17 times a day, you act like an uncontrollable washing machine with an imbalanced load. Your lips flare away from your teeth, your eyes squint, your abdominal muscles and diaphragm start shaking and spazzing out, and you double up and pitch forward. Air is expelled from your lungs, and you gasp for breath. You emit rhythmic but involuntary vowel sounds 75 milliseconds long and 210 milliseconds apart until you run out of air. That’s the alchemy of laughter.

You hear or see something funny or get tickled, and in four-tenths of a second, an electrical impulse surges through your brain. Then you laugh. You light up, same as like after an epiphany, where you suddenly grasp for a moment, the Meaning of Life. It’s the soundtrack for the moment when the black of the Yin turns itself inside out, into the white of the Yang. You burst into laughter. Peals of laughter ring like church bells. You roar with laughter like the King of the Jungle. Or you snort, or you snicker. You chortle, you crow, or you giggle. Or you go into hysterics and roll on the floor in fits of laughter. You might even hiccup, wheeze, or cry when you laugh. Everyone has a unique style of laughter like a fingerprint. Dogs laugh, panting, and babies laugh before they speak. Laughter is probably the most animal-like noise we make, from the depths of our primordial selves. Laughter breaks through all language barriers.

Like crying, laughter is difficult to fake or turn on at will. Mostly, we laugh when the natural order of the Universe tips--when we hear a joke with a twist, or at a misstep. We laugh at absurdity, or we laugh with surprise. Our laughter heralds the arrival of the Holy Unpredictable, come to relieve us of the status quo. Sometimes we just laugh because other people are laughing. Laughter connects people. Why does it feel good to laugh? Because for those few minutes, 17 times a day, you lose control. You drop your assumptions about the world as it’s supposed to be. That’s what “funny” means: differing from the ordinary.

We laugh with relief that we don’t have it all figured out and under control. Seventeen times a day, we get gently shaken up, like there’s an earth tremor going on.
The earth shakes
just enough
to remind us.

Submission Guidelines for the Amateur

2008-03-01T18:26:00.006-06:00

The word “amateur” is derived from the French and Latin words for “lover.” An amateur is someone who practices his art or sport for love, not for money. With the explosion of the Internet has come a more amateur-friendly world. For about ten years now, anyone has been able to publish on a blog for free, for all the world to view, and blog posts are not just here today, gone tomorrow. A blog can be as powerful and inspiring as a sermon, as hilarious as a stand-up comedy show, or as irrelevant and gross as the hairball the cat coughed up last night. We finally have true Freedom of the Press. Yet writers keep trying to publish the old-fashioned way, too, and the first step is to wade through the “submission guidelines” of hundreds of publications and publishers.

I have some problems with that word ”submission” right off the bat. It means to yield control to the opinion of some randomly self-proclaimed authority, to present yourself for comparative review like a Miss America contestant, and to be considered for acceptance like you were pledging some exclusive sorority. When my friend’s dog displays submission upon encountering my dominant dog, she rolls onto her back, legs in the air, exposing her soft underbelly, and she pees. Submission is not a pretty thing.

Then there is the problem of the three categories. Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. What if you don’t fit neatly into any of those categories? Where do you draw the line between fiction and nonfiction? Fiction is more often than not drawn from real-life experiences and observations. Nonfiction is often a subjective interpretation of the real world, whether it’s a memoir, a travel piece, a food review, or a scientific explanation. Then they have “creative nonfiction,” which is supposed to be fact that reads like fiction. Why not then have “noncreative fiction,” which would be dull, dry fiction that reads like fact? A writer can report news using “literary journalism” or via press releases that are devoid of bylines--and devoid of any evidence of the writer’s personality.

Well, I give up trying to publish at about this point. Where do rants fit in? Rants--the outrage, the irony, like a dog barking for the sake of barking. Maybe rants belong back in the blog. And where do sermonlike rants fit in? With the street-crazies on their soapboxes in the park? There are no publications for these kinds of writings. Yet I think I was born at the right time for a writer. Yeah, I think I’ll just stay right here in my blog. Because when you send your writing to a publication, all of a sudden your writing represents them. And their advertisers, as the case may be. So, you have to please and not offend their readers/potential consumers too. Thus, the submission guidelines.

The blogosphere has made the artistic underground less of a hiding place and more of an alternative public platform. I want to write blog posts like graffiti in cyberspace: “graffiti”--unsanctioned writing or drawing on a public surface.

I WAS HERE.

Triptych

2008-02-12T20:12:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

February

2008-02-12T17:24:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Why the Year of the Rat?

2008-02-03T19:19:00.000-06:00

photocollages by Joanna Key

The relationship between rats and men: talk about unrequited love! Moving in with some humans is the best thing that can ever possibly happen to a rat. But when you as a human have rats come into your life, that is like your worst nightmare, and the rodents are nearly impossible to get rid of.

People have never managed to eliminate the rat population or even outsmart them, whereas rats have managed to nearly wipe out the human race with the plague several times over. Rats can also give us typhus or rabies. Rats can damage our crops and also make our stored food unfit to eat by nibbling on it and excreting on it too. They shred insulation and gnaw wires. What good do rats ever do us? Certain desperate human populations, like those starving, imprisoned, or stranded in the Arctic, for example, have been known to eat rats to survive. In India, rat skins are used to make purses, gloves, baby shoes, and watch straps. Rats are good for experiments because they breed a lot and can learn from their mistakes well enough to navigate through mazes. That’s about it.

Unless you grew up in a slum, you were probably introduced to rats with Robert Browning’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” The town of Hamelin was overrun with rats. With his music, the Pied Piper entices all the village rats to follow him out of town, but once the rats are gone, the people of Hamelin refuse the pay the piper his fee. For revenge, the piper then lures away all the village children with his hypnotic pipe music, and the children disappear into a mountain hideaway forever. The Pied Piper was a repo man; rats are nothing but trouble. So why does the Chinese lunar calendar even have a year of the rat?

Why We Can’t Wait: Slackers, Get Up!

2008-01-20T21:44:00.000-06:00

Why We Can’t Wait is the title of a book Martin Luther King, Jr., published when he was about 35, in the 1960s. One of the bravest and most brilliant of American heroes, King taught us why we, collectively as a nation, could not wait--to resolve matters of racial inequality and civil rights. But as the country annually reviews his words and achievements on the commemoration of his birth, the third Monday in January, we should also take the time to consider “why we can’t wait” on a more individual level. What is this thing called Procrastination?

Procrastination is intentionally putting off something that you feel, in your heart of hearts, that you should be doing. Compare your life to MLK’s life: Born in 1929, King went to college at age 15, going on to earn a B.A., Bachelor of Divinity, and a PhD. At age 26, he led the famous thirteen-month bus boycott that influenced the Supreme Court decision to outlaw racial segregation on buses. Between the ages of 28 and 39, King gave over 2,500 speeches, wrote five books, was arrested over 20 times, and led numerous nonviolent protests, marches, and voter registration drives. When MLK was only 35, he was granted the Nobel Peace Prize. Tragically, his life was cut short by an assassin in 1968, when he was just 39--and I know people in their 40s and 50s still wondering what they want to be when they grow up.

Most of us cruise along with some vague notion that we will do great things--or at least something that will make a difference beyond our own lifetimes, leaving a notch in the bedposts of history, so to speak. But what are we waiting for--an engraved invitation, a vision, a phone call from Oprah? We think, someday. But as the bumper sticker says: “Someday is not a day of the week.” MLK wrote in Letter from Birmingham Jail, “‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” Why do we keep waiting for the “right time,” putting aside our goals and hesitating instead of taking risks?

Most people have dreams, even obsessions, about how they want their worlds to change--whether it’s on an individual level, or within their own small family circle, a community, a country, or the whole world. But a lot of people tend to put off the pursuit of their important dreams out of fear, I think. Fear of failure, fear of change, fear of success, fear of responsibility, fear of criticism, fear of attention, or fear of rejection. Procrastinators are brilliant at finding distractions so they never finish what they start or never even start. They make up excuses to keep running around on the same old hamster-wheels forever, just squeaking like rodents, and the outside world never hears their real voices.

Another one of my heroes, Pablo Picasso, said, “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

2008, You Can Take a Flying Leap!

2008-01-10T13:26:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Do you ever wonder about Leap Year, and the fact that the calendars we all faithfully trust are actually out-of-sync with the Earth as it orbits the Sun? So, lamely, to readjust, we throw in an extra day every four years and then 1 hapless baby in every 1,461 births, born on February 29, has to have a birthday that disappears for three years at a time. In some states and on some applications, Leap-day babies are not even allowed to claim that birth day and are recorded as being born either February 28 or March 1.

To review your third-grade science lesson, the Earth takes about 365 and one-fourth calendar days to orbit the Sun, so the Earth actually takes slightly longer than a calendar year to orbit the Sun, by about one-fourth of a day, or six hours. Without adding a Leap Day in four-year intervals, the calendar would creep a day ahead of the seasonal cycle every four years. So in years like 2008, we add an extra day, February 29, like a guest invited as an afterthought. Why bother? Well, without the Leap Day, every 100 years, the calendar would get ahead by 25 days and things would get really out of whack, like our first calendar day of summer in June would start when the earthly season was actually the springlike month of May. Kids would start summer vacation when it was still too cool for the pool.

But as things are, Leap Years get omitted three times every four hundred years to say in sync with the Earth's orbit--but, forget about the details, I’m getting a headache just thinking about it and we are still about a half a minute out-of-sync even with the century adjustment.

Although it’s too bad about the Leap-day babies with their illegitimate birthdays needing to join support groups, it’s kind of liberating to realize that humans, with our neat rows and columns on our calendars’ measured days, weeks, and months, still can’t really keep in step with the dance of the cosmos unless we add a clumsy maneuver like Leap Day every once in a while: humans outclassed by Nature again.

Pathological Packrats?

2007-12-26T15:53:00.000-06:00

Whew! The season of buying, wrapping, and giving objects is finally over, at least for another year.

It’s bad enough that we collect way too many objects on our own but then other people have to also contribute to the clutter in our homes. It’s such a pointless waste of time--searching for objects, spending money on objects, arranging objects, obsessing about objects. They’re objects, for God’s sake, yet people seek them, shell out lots of cash for them, take tender care of them and protect them, and get preoccupied with them just as if they were people they loved ... hmmmm. Well, maybe that’s why collecting objects is such a universal pastime.

Remember your first teddy bear? When you were away from your parents, you could clutch this stuffed animal object for comfort. Then you got some more stuffed animals to use as backup. We get emotionally attached to objects. We squirrel things away. It could be a throwback to a primitive instinct: hoarding to ensure survival. Or it could be a totally pointless pastime. When I was a kid, I used to save the wrappers from the gum I chewed. Then people started giving me the wrappers from the gum they chewed. Then I started buying exotic kinds of chewing gum I didn’t even like, just for the wrappers. I wove the wrappers into long braided chains. Kids are just natural collectors and hoarders, of cards, marbles, found objects, anything, really. Kids are good at turning their possessions into treasures, assigning magical properties to something that others just see as ordinary. Hey, that’s starting to sound a lot like love again. You single out something, appreciate its unique qualities, give it special attention, and grant it the power to affect you emotionally.

The collecting syndrome begins the same way as love: it starts the first time you suddenly look at an object (person) in a different way, as something precious and special. But the difference between collecting and love is that, with objects, you can usually acquire another similar one to re-experience that amazing rush of feeling. Then, as the novelty wears off and the dust starts to collect on the objects you have, you can acquire another one and then another one, for the rest of your life. Hey, that sort of sounds like addiction or self-medication.

Well, whatever happens that turns simple fun, hobby, or investment collecting into pathological obsessive hoarding (leading to financial ruin, neglect of responsibilities, and loss of touch with reality), collecting is still a very human way to pass the time--or even the only way to pass the time, for some people! Almost everyone collects something (witness the insane popularity of eBay)--gold, stamps, sugar packets, celebrity memorabilia, panda statues, matchbooks, rocks, etc., etc. I had a landlord who collected all of his cut toenails and fingernails in a giant jar. Objects do have the sort of magical capability of capturing moments in time and later conjuring up the past. You can hoard your everyday objects or you can seek out exotic finds. A quest is exciting, and the treasures at the end of your collecting quests are like a set of trophies.

My preference is for collecting rocks because I can’t quite believe that I am able to hold objects that have been around for millions of years (this thought puts my life into its proper perspective, over and over again). When I get too many rocks, I can carry some of them outdoors and drop them on the ground for someone else to collect--or not.

Zen and the Art of Health Maintenance

2007-11-20T19:42:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Rarely in life are people happy to waste money. But enter the World of the Insured--a land of paradox, a mirror universe. The more money you pay into the insurance coffers, the more you can relax and stop worrying about financial ruin. You pray that you’ll just pay money in without ever getting anything but warm, fuzzy thoughts in return. Because, in the insurance world, you only “hit the jackpot” after a great calamity.

Every time I write my big quarterly check for sky-high-deductible, private-pay health insurance, the loudest thought in my mind is, You are wasting your money. But then the argumentative cricket on my shoulder reminds me that one day I might be glad I am covered. So I tumble through a few more mental gymnastics as I fill in the blanks on my check. And after working my thoughts through the Four-Step Program mapped out below, I find myself popping the check into an envelope and sealing it with at least a half-smile of resignation.

Meditation on the Positive Side of Paying for Health Insurance

The community contribution. View the insured group as a community that pools its resources in case one or more of its members falls upon misfortune. Paying insurance is like giving generously to a charity. Some day that charity might even help you in a time of disaster. Plus, a lot of us don’t talk to or even know our neighbors or co-workers anymore, but we can still feel that we are helping them out when we pay into the insurance treasury. With my contribution, I will be helping others who have fallen into bad luck with illness or an accident.

The wishing-well custom. Our culture is more superstitious that we care to admit. I can feel as if I am making a wish to stay healthy, by tossing my (many, many) coins into Blue Cross/Blue Shield’s big wishing well [insert the name of your carrier of choice]. If all I’m losing by paying for insurance is money, then I’m doing pretty well. I can make more money; on the other hand, health and mobility after an accident are not so easy to replace.

A rite of superstition. I can even think of the insurance premiums as the equivalent of primitive animal sacrifices that were once offered to the gods when people wanted to receive favors: I hereby sacrifice my imaginary lamb, goat, the blood of my roosters--or I sacrifice my weekly paycheck--hoping for another sickness-free, disability-free three months of existence.

An offering. I could leave fruit, flowers, candles, prayers, my favorite food--or how about just my week’s grocery allowance--at the altar of my insurance carrier’s office. I have been healthy and safe. I have escaped from harm. I must continue to appease the gods with further payments.

P.S. The above bit of advice is on how to make the best of a bad situation. Of course, I shouldn’t even have to be rationalizing the high price I pay for minimal health insurance coverage. Obviously, health care should be equally affordable and accessible to all citizens. I am not disregarding the fact that the U.S. health care system is an unforgivable national disgrace (but read the political blogs ’cause I’m not going there).

Another Species

2007-10-27T23:16:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

"And the lion shall lie down with the lamb,
but the lamb won't get much sleep." --Woody Allen

They’re Not Playing Possum! It’s a Nervous Collapse

2007-10-18T22:38:00.000-06:00

The outcast of the neighborhood nightlife scene creeps out from a day nap under a backyard deck and slowly waddles over to a trashcan with a loose lid, using her prehensile tail and clawed feet to easily climb inside. She has beady, black eyes in a ghostly white face, a long, scaly, ratlike tail, and freakish thumbs on her hind feet. If you get close, she gives off a musky, putrid smell. She has a tendency to drool and hiss when upset. She is carrying thirteen babies in her kangaroolike belly pouch. She has frostbitten, raggedy ears, a broken tail tip, and missing toes to display how her generation of opossums has migrated to the northern states but has not managed to adapt to the harsh winters. She survives because she will scavenge and eat just about anything she can find, which unfortunately includes roadkills--a habit which could eventually lead to her becoming a roadkill herself.

Opossums are famous for their habit of going limp when they’re afraid, as when an animal attacks them or a car approaches them. They fall on their sides and pretty much look dead. But this relates to a myth I want to correct. The opossum’s habit of keeling over into a nervous collapse has even become an idiom relating to humans--“playing possum”--which means you pretend to be sleeping so that someone won’t bother or attack you. Well, possums aren’t actually “playing” possum at all; it’s not some sort of a clever riot strategy or a game where they’re giggling silently and thinking, Ha-ha, fooled them into thinking I’m dead so now they'll leave me alone. Opossums are not very intelligent; even a cat has a brain five times bigger. The temporary paralysis that we think is a smart scam is really just involuntary, fear-driven shock. The possum is terrified because it doesn’t have a lot of ways to defend itself against predators (or oncoming traffic). Opossums are very slow. So when the fear chemicals course through the opossum’s blood, it just gets overwhelmed with intense terror and goes down.

Humans and animals move through four levels of fear: freeze, flight, fight, and tonic immobility. "Playing possum" would be the final stage. Freeze is the first response, where you go all still and your senses get extra-alert to assess some danger that you perceive. Then you can try to flee (“flight”). If there’s no escape, then you have to stand your ground and try to fight to defend yourself. But when there is no possibility of escaping or winning a fight, then the last stage of fear is to involuntarily go limp (this is "tonic immobility" or “playing possum"). At this stage, it's as if the mind, which is used to being in control, just bails out. The "you" dissociates from the body and separates from the traumatic experience. Some people call this a temporary soul migration. So, see, there is nothing playful about the collapse of a very frightened human or an alarmed, defenseless opossum.

Breaking Up via E-mail: It's Howdy Doody Time!

2007-09-14T09:20:00.000-06:00

Baby boomers will remember that goofy TV puppet, Howdy Doody, with the gap between his teeth, polka-dot freckles, cup-handle ears, and the cowboy getup. I was not a big fan, and I remember speaking to the TV set even then, asking Buffalo Bob, Can’t you find a real person to talk to up there? We can see you moving your lips! Now that I’ve grown up cynical, I say, Buffalo Bob got to control both sides of the conversation. I’ll bet he thought he had it made!

My friend recently used e-mail to break up what I thought was a promising relationship. She was jumping to a lot of conclusions. She forwarded me a copy of her e-mail message, and all I could think was, What about his side of the story? E-mail has made it far too easy to perform unilateral breakups that are often just based on misunderstandings. It’s all too effortless now to state your case uninterrupted from start to finish, to hit the “send” button to fire your missive, and to make a direct hit. That’s too tactical a way to deal with affairs of the heart, in my old-fashioned opinion.

When a relationship flies through turbulence--that’s not the time to cover your eyes and ears or play a lot of guessing games. A face-to-face reckoning will bring up the most information, whether it's spoken or just perceived. Nobody thinks twice about lying or pretending to a computer monitor. You can pretty much write things down the way you want them to be. But face-to-face, your body and your nerves and your empathy all come into play. You might as well tear up your script and start living your life in real-time for a change.

First, the coward’s breakup tool was to simply disappear, or, to offer a bit of respect, the “Dear John” letter (or “John Deere” letter if you live where I live) was slipped under a door. Then came the evil phone message left on the answering machine to break someone’s heart. And now, the ultimate convenience is the poison “pen” e-mail. But cowardice is not the issue; almost nobody likes to reject and hurt somebody who likes them. Assuming that you know what somebody else is thinking is the problem. Instead, try to draw conclusions in some two-way manner with instant feedback--not e-mail. Don't speak and then work the puppet's mouth--and then pretend you’ve had a conversation! That's just the television we grew up on, aired five days a week! No wonder!

Pop Goes the Weasel!

2007-09-07T21:51:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

How's Your Sense of Direction? Navigationally Challenged?

2007-08-26T13:10:00.001-06:00

Remember that dizzy, disoriented feeling you got as a kid when blindfolded at birthday parties to play “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”? Invariably, some kids would pin the tail not even near the donkey’s hind end, but on the wall in the next room, which everyone thought was hilarious. Being lost feels like that—not knowing if you're going in the right direction and not even knowing where you are.

The map in the glove compartment is like a security blanket. North, east, south, or west—what comforting concepts. You either go forward, or right, or you turn around, or you go left. I envy the way a dog can bypass the need for a map and just follow a scent to find its way back home. Some humans have a good sense of direction, too, because they can imagine themselves hovering over a map of wherever they might be. Or, at night, they can put together that stuff about locating the North Star (sorry but they all look the same to me), which stays in the exact same place as the Earth turns, and they can draw an imaginary line from that star to the horizon—assuming a person can even see the horizon or the stars behind the clouds and light pollution! Some people you meet brag of such a dependable sense of direction that they seem to have built-in GPS systems—or at least low-tech magnetic-needle compasses—in their heads.

On the other hand, some people tend to get lost a lot: call them “navigationally challenged.” They get lost because they don’t take inventory of the natural and manmade landmarks that they are passing. Or maybe because, when given a map, their brains scream in protest that “the map is not the territory.” To these people, north, south, east, and west are just words; they might as well be blindfolded because their steps are truly random.

In a populated area, of course, you can never really be lost for long (unless you refuse to ask for directions). The two times when I have been truly lost were both when I mistakenly assumed I that I knew where I was walking, in wooded, relatively wild areas. Both times, the key to being found was to seek signs of civilization—a rooftop or phone wires or even a lighter area through the trees that meant a clearing that might be a road. One time I was near Blanco, Texas, roaming lost for a few hours in blazing midday heat through the wooded, snake-infested hill country. I had been looking for flat rocks so I could pry them up and collect scorpions in a jar. I got lost another time in some east central Illinois woods for two hours at dusk and after dark because I was hiking in an unfamiliar area with some dogs and enjoying the crunch of the dead leaves and daydreamingly looking at branches against the winter sky. Then I realized that I was not on the trail leading back up the hill to the house where I was visiting. I had just seen The Blair Witch Project so I started to imagine effigies hanging in trees and little piles of stones on the ground arranged a little too carefully to be random. After racing in circles through the woods looking for the right trail, eventually I sat down at the top of the hill and made myself breathe deeply to subdue a panic attack. At that point, I saw a barn roof and headed down to take the very long way back, reaching a driveway, that led to a road, that finally led me back to where I was supposed to be hours earlier. The dogs who had abandoned me long before came trotting up to greet me.

Normally, I have an okay sense of direction because I imprint scenery like into a mental scrapbook as I travel along unfamiliar territory. I developed this skill until it became automatic, when I was mainly a bicycle commuter and avid pedestrian all the way until my thirties. Monitoring the landmarks is, of course, more difficult at 50 or 65 miles per hour on the road while driving or riding in a car. It is also difficult to maintain a sense of direction at night (especially in the wilderness) when you can’t see your surroundings. I was always grateful that the area south of Chicago, where I grew up, was more or less a huge grid with numbered east-west streets. If the numbers were getting higher as I drove or walked, I was going south. I do have a respect for maps, too, so I do okay, but I’m still no homing pigeon who stays oriented by sensing distant infrasounds from the sea. I could sometimes use the bumper sticker that says “Don’t Follow Me. I’m Lost Too.”

I never get lost because I don't know where I'm going. —from the "Daily Afflictions" Web site (a Zen saying?)

Lone Wolf Snowglobe

2007-08-16T10:29:00.000-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

Firefly, the Redneck Insect

2007-07-19T20:24:00.000-06:00

That title is a phrase coined—not by Jeff Foxworthy—but by the seventeenth century haiku master Basho:

Alas, the firefly seen by daylight
is nothing but a rednecked insect.

I have been guilty of catching fireflies in a jar, like most of us who grew up in the USA east of Kansas. But if anyone had told me that fireflies only live for a week or two in their lightning bug stage, I know I would never have made any fireflies spend a night of their short lives in my mayonnaise-jar jail. But if you simply have to capture fireflies, then at least put a damp paper towel in the jar because they need humidity. Then set them free as soon as possible.

At night, I am a jar of fireflies dying.
—Gregory Orr

Not only do fireflies amazingly light up like they were chain smoking cigarettes in the backyard, but they don’t do any of the annoying things that other insects do like buzz, sting, bite, drink your blood, attach themselves to you or your dog, contaminate your food, ruin your picnic, destroy your crops, or chew up your house. And, by the way, if you have one of those torture devices on your patio commonly known as the “bug zapper,” then get rid of it immediately because it lures fireflies and then electrocutes them.

summer night—
fireflies spark
children’s laughter.
—Dale Kirby

star gazing ...
a firefly joins
Cassiopeia.
—Jeanne Emrich

Firefly season goes from Memorial Day through July where I live, in Illinois. The most familiar type is called “The Big Dipper.” If you put this kind inside a jar, it usually stops flashing. A firefly’s bioluminescence supposedly is not random; it’s a mating signal. I guess I believe that, because fireflies have to have some gimmick to keep their species going when they only have a week to two to mate.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same despair,
Show an affirming flame.
—W. H. Auden, from “September 1, 1939"

Unlike a light bulb, which gives off way more heat than light, a firefly’s glow is a rare, cold light. That same firefly chemical magically lights up those glow sticks and eerie glow-in-the-dark necklaces that tattooed guys loop on their arms and sell at fairs.

A firefly?
Car driving
with its turn signal on—
no corners in sight.
—Joanna Key

The F-Word: Pop Goes the Weasel

2007-07-17T17:13:00.000-06:00

Maybe relationships rarely work out because your fantasies rarely match the other person’s fantasies. You have fantasies of a relationship being wonderful because, say, a guy is going to do certain things well and be a certain kind of person plus he is also really going to like you and all your flaws and complications. But then he has a whole different business plan--probably not similar to yours (e.g., you will go with him and enjoy NASCAR races, fishing, bowling, and church) plus you have to really like him and all his flaws and complications. When fantasies collide, the relationship crashes and burns.

In the actual business world, partnership success is more likely because you don't have to like the other person(s) or be concerned with his breath, housekeeping skills, sense of humor, or musical taste. But whether we admit it or not, we tend to chart a course and keep a mental list of requirements and strategies when we date or marry that parallels a business plan. Venturing into the dating battleground might start the same way as a more formal partnership:

· You provide the profile you want the general public to believe.
· You do a market analysis and delineate characteristics of your target market.
· You devise a dating strategy and name your objectives.
· You reveal your baggage (kids, jobs, parents, mortgage, debts, mental problems).
· You disclose what resources you have to support the lifestyle you desire.

One big problem with dating is having long-term goals and expecting the other person to fit in with your arrangements. This problem is the F-word, as in Future. It’s as if we believe that, by making detailed long-term plans, we can better control our destinies, even in relationships. But think about it, especially if you’ve been on this planet for around half a century like most people I know: how often have things ever gone the way you planned them? Plans are generally based on being practical and ensuring security. But the best opportunities are often a matter of luck, risk taking, detours, and impulse—there is nothing sensible about them. Plans, however, are often designed using what has worked for generations before or what has worked for you before—or worse—based on what didn’t work before but you’re hoping will work this time around. The future is unknown. It really is. There are an infinite number of variables that determine how things will play out. And people are infinitely complicated, so multiply that by two when it comes to gambling on romance.

I’m no expert, but maybe there’s another option in dating rather than having a plan. Maybe a better idea is to suspend your fantasies about what a relationship even is, disregard your expectations, and just focus on liking the other person. It’s really a lot simpler to just take the relationship meeting by meeting and stay focused on the present rather than the future. Maybe just reflect on whether or not you kinda like the guy and whether or not he kinda likes you. Then, when the flaws appear on the third date, and the music stops and the jack-in-the-box pops out, reflect on whether or not it is worth it to you to put up with the flaws, while he reflects on the same for you. Let the relationship define itself, and that will be its perfectly true meaning at any given time. The only time a detailed business plan looks perfect is at the beginning, on paper, before anything ever happens that does not fit in with the scheme.

I hate the sound of “you don’t fit into to my future” because there is no “my future”; the future is always based on collaboration—between family, friends, coworkers, strangers, communities, and global connections too. Something or someone—from a stray puppy or a baby or the lottery to a stock market crash or the bird flu or a nuclear bomb--is always going to interfere with (or enhance) your plans; get used to it, and enjoy the present instead. The future does not exist, yet still people give it way too much importance.

Do Not Ever Open This Box!

2007-07-01T20:50:00.001-06:00

collage by Joanna Key

That story about Pandora was completely unfair. I had the Little Golden Book version as a kid. If there ever was a book that should be banned, it’s that one. That type of plot twist just invites all sorts of cheesy lit crit essays about misogyny or Hope or The Fall. And just about everyone who reads that story misses the point.

First of all, that box was an unbelievably rotten gift! What’s the point of having a box that you are not, under any circumstances, allowed to open? That was no gift—it was a curse! It was irresponsible! There was no way that Pandora wasn’t going to open that box eventually. I’m sure her life was pure hell after getting that so-called gift, and the temptation to open the box was probably gnawing at the back of her mind like some rodent in between the walls.

See, what’s happening is that you’ve already turned against Pandora at this point in the story. At least one of outrageous morals of this story is that curiosity is a bad thing, a weakness! Well, curiosity is actually on my personal Top 10 Traits list. I hate this story. But, anyhow, crumbling under the weight of her own inquisitiveness, Pandora opens the box, then tries to slam it shut, but it’s too late—all the world’s evils fly out, and this is somehow all Pandora’s fault. Then, to make this horrendous mythological audience manipulation even more infuriating, there’s one thing left in the box: hope. Okay, if it’s a box of evils, then what was hope doing there in the first place?

In my Little Golden Book version of the story, the “evils” were shown as a swarm of black insects. Is that the worst thing they could think of to symbolize the evils and sufferings of the world—despair, disease, cruelty, war, greed, violence, old age, death, etc.? Really, all that is reduced to a bunch of bugs? ... I mean it, do not ever read this story to a child!

Running with Scissors Day

2007-06-15T05:23:00.000-06:00

"I always liked Flag day."--Zippy the Pinhead

The other evening, which happened to be Flag Day, June 14, my daughter and I were walking the dogs when we passed a group of guys in uniform who were standing in a circle, some saluting and some folding an American flag. Suddenly they turned around and put the flag into a big campfire and watched it burn! The red and white stripes recoiled from the tongues of flame; the blue patch shriveled and curled into black flakes. I was totally shocked, but my daughter explained that on Flag Day a lot people burn their sun-faded, tattered old flags. Although it's slightly embarrassing when your kid knows something you don't know, I was more glad to finally learn the purpose of Flag Day. What I had just witnessed was sort of a cremation--not an act of insurrection by people impersonating Boy Scouts and Legionnaires in the middle of a school field in the middle of the Republican Bible Belt.

I like that concept--a holiday on which you can break a law or a rule with no repercussions. Like if they had a Break the Speed Limit day. Or a Leave a Restaurant without Paying for Your Food Day. Park Wherever You Want To Day. Shoplifting Amnesty Day. Or a day where you can go from one theater to the next and watch all the movies being shown at a cineplex for the price of one.

Stop Talking While I’m Trying to Interrupt!

2007-05-21T14:29:00.002-06:00

You’re on the phone, and suddenly there’s a dead click, and a word goes missing from your friend’s sentence. You hear “Oops, got another call, bye.” Call waiting: making the world a ruder place, one interruption at a time. Or you’re trying to relax and watch television, but the program you want to see is repeatedly interrupted by an onslaught of loud, asinine commercials. Or you sit down to dinner, but the phone rings, and your meal is rudely interrupted by the voice of some perky telemarketer with the telltale inflection of someone reading from a script.

OK, so we all know the world is full of irritating interruptions. However, interrupting can actually enhance a conversation. As most of my friends will agree, I have a problem with interrupting. But it is something I’m conscious of, and I really do try to bite my tongue and retain my digressions, putting my two cents in only at the proper pause. However, the reason that I never completely quit my habit of interrupting is twofold: when other people interrupt me, I usually don’t care, and I see a conversation as a duet—not a duel.

A casual conversation is not a debate. You should not have to hold in your commentary or your rebuttal until you feel like you’re going to explode before the speaker is done stating his case. A conversation is also not like an arm wrestling contest, where you try to dominate and overcome the other person with your superior power. A conversation is a dynamic exchange. If somebody interrupts me, then I know I’ve engaged his interest and inspired a reaction. Or it means that I’m rambling too much or that he thinks he has something important to add before the subject changes. If I really want to complete a thought or a story without interruption, I’ll ask you to let me finish. Please do the same to me. I mainly need to finish sometimes just to prevent blanking out from short-term memory loss!

The worst thing you can do when I interrupt is to zip your mouth closed in anger or resignation and refuse to speak again after I make my comment. I hate that! As a habitual but courteous interrupter, I try to place a mental bookmark in somebody’s speech before butting in, so I can help him to resume when I’m done. Of course, I feel guilty if I cause someone to forget where he was going with his speech. However, habitual interrupters are often good listeners, contrary to popular belief.

An interrupting listener might have a question about something I’m saying. I might be confusing him, and he needs me to explain or rephrase. He might need to correct me. He might have an interesting anecdote that illustrates what I’m saying. He might have a funny aside. He might lead us both off onto an unexpectedly interesting tangent. All of those opportunities will be sadly lost if I don’t let him speak until I run out of words or I run out of breath—whichever comes first!

If there is a situation where one and only one speaker needs to have the floor, then you can copy the Native American tradition of using a "talking stick." A speaker holds a stick, perhaps decorated with beads, shells, or feathers, and when he finishes speaking, he passes it or holds it out for the next speaker to claim. No interruptions are allowed. In the book Lord of the Flies, only the boy who was holding the conch shell was allowed to speak at meetings (not that that book should be used as a model for social order!). An activity used in speech therapy is to pass a toy microphone back and forth between designated speakers, to teach kids with autism “turn taking” in conversation.

The rules of turn taking in conversation are actual pretty random. In some cultures (Italian, Egyptian, Brazilian, and others), people freely interrupt and often talk at the same time, and it is not considered rude. In the Jewish culture, if somebody does not interrupt a speaker, then it’s a sign that he is either bored, not listening, or has no opinions! In India, a request to refrain from interrupting means that your opinions are considered unimportant. Which would you, as a speaker, rather have--conversational break-ins or blank stares and passive silence? But try not to interrupt if you’re in Sweden or Japan; they hate it. In America, interrupting is still, I think for the most part, considered rude. We can change that if everyone will just forward this blog entry to 50 of their friends! Mainstream Americans also tend to feel uncomfortable with silent pauses in a conversation, with too much or too little eye contact, with loud talking in public, and with people who stand too close inside another’s “personal space.” But in New York City, it is not uncommon for a total stranger to eavesdrop on a conversation and then join in (according to sociolinguist and former New Yorker Deborah Tannen).

So, friends, please interrupt me whenever you need to—it’s OK, unless you see me holding the conch shell or the talking stick. An interruption does not stop the flow of a conversation; instead, the speakers are paddling together down the stream of talk, and both voices propel the discussion--first one, then the other, whenever, or both at the same time.