Warmedover leftovers

That is how Jean Shepherd used to describe the less than delectable reheated foods of his youth. I just had some leftover turkey from our "Thanksgiving" (Sunday, actually) visit to my mother-in-law's house. My MIL is a pretty good cook for an old English lady, but she now prefers not to make the effort to cook for even the small crowd that we were on Sunday. At first she'd make part of the meal, then less and less until she now does no cooking at all.

We bring parts of the dinner, but since we're driving a long way, we don't handle the hot food, someone else does. That person is very smart, a doctor who's head of an important function at a major hospital and lives alone in Riverdale. My experience with single people and cooking, however, is that they fall roughly into two main categories. There are those who take cooking on as a hobby and enjoy cooking gourmet foods for themselves and anyone they might have over. Then there are those who cook because are sick of tuna fish and cereal and they need something to eat in order to not die. This person, unfortunately, seems to fall into the latter category.

As a result, each year, the Thanksgiving meals have gotten progressively tastelesser. The roast turkey is now turkey parts with, at least as far as I can tell, no seasoning whatsoever. This does not yield really flavorful gravy either. The crispy pan-fried potatoes that were a pain to cook but beloved are now mashed potatoes (with no butter or milk for kashrut). Not a pretty sight.

Of course, we have to take leftovers, because it's rude not to. We just had some of them for dinner and they will not make a repeat performance on the table or anywhere else. Even with my making our own roasted potatoes, it was still a difficult slog to get most of the way through the rest of it.

There's no real moral to this story, aside from helping me to remember that it's okay for the point of Thanksgiving to be the company rather than the food and the company was good. Can't make sandwiches from it though.

Creating traditions

Periodically, you'll hear about something being a "new tradition." This is a perfect example of internal contradiction, where the combination of ideas negates all meaning.  There simply is no such thing nor can there be.

I think what people mean when they call something a new tradition is that they want to start something new, but that it relates to some traditional form. That's fine, I guess, but things are usually traditions for specific reasons that can't just be created out of thin air or whole cloth or whatever cliche you'd like to insert. The Harvard-Yale football game, and the revelry that surrounds it, is a tradition because they've been doing the same thing over and over again for a really long time. I'll bet you that in 1875 nobody was saying they were going to start a new tradition, or creating a soon-to-be traditional rivalry. I'd bet that nobody really gave it any thought for many many years.

Usually, what happens is that people do something, think it's cool, and say, let's do that again. Then it grows organically from there until it's finally thought of as a tradition. I suspect that many minor holidays developed this way, and Thanksgiving certainly did.

We've never really had a big Thanksgiving thing in my family. I'm pretty sure we always did the whole turkey thing, but it was never as big a deal as, say, Pesach. It was never a "let's everyone get together and make a family meal" kind of thing. It just wasn't the way things went.

As much as I may feel deprived because I rarely had the kind of big, warm, family gathering that's described to me by friends, I can't just decide that I want to suddenly have something like that and then just make it happen.

This became vivid to me when my mom got sick about 10 years ago. My mom and I were never super close, for a variety of reasons. We got along fine, but our relationship was nothing much more than that. So when we found out that she had ALS and would be declining steadily, I was struck by an urge to pull close. But after a couple of visits and some consideration, I realized that we weren't close for a reason. The relationship was mature and had not been changing for the previous 10 years, so why should it change now? Was I going to try to create something where nothing existed before? It struck me as arrogant to think I could do such a thing,  and silly to think that I would do it.

So now, 10 years later, I have little regret for that decision. My mom has many admirable qualities, some of which I am proud to have inherited. But there was no chance that I was going to be able to create a new tradition of closeness between us, even if I really wanted to.

Things I am thankful for

If I'm walking along and the wind blows I don't topple over

I have never been bitten by a squirrel

Plastic trash bags- you young folks can't imagine what it used to be like

My job, my colleagues, my students

Dancing with the Stars is over and American Idol hasn't started

Quiet moments

Funny old photographs of me and my friends

Coffee

That double-acting Baking Powder really does act twice

Indoor plumbing

Google maps

Potato chips

Les Paul, The Beatles, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan

I haven't seen or read anything Twilight-related and yet somehow know the whole story

The sky on a cold, clear night

I'm sure there's more, but that'll do for now.

The Annual Black Friday survey results

Who you gonna call? Doorbusters!

Last year seemed to be an off year for Black Friday ads. This year the doorbusters are back in fine form. There's been a steady trend toward earlier by the mainstream stores and this year is no exception. So here are the Friday opening hours for all stores whose ad's I've received.

Midnight: 1

3:00   1

4:00   6

5:00   14

5:30   1

6:00   7

7:00   1

8:00   1

9:00   3

No hours mentioned (an odd thing, I think. When are we supposed to bust the door?)   8

Open Thanksgiving Day   2

The winner this year is Old Navy, with second place to Boscov's.

I have this book called "The Final Four of Everything,"where you pick a topic and make brackets like in the NCAA basketball tournament. The categories are fun, Breakfast Cereal (Crunch Berries rule!), Bald Guys (hmm, Ghandi vs. Homer Simpson), teeth (done by a dentist, of course), and more. One of my favorites is Dangerous Animals. It's not determined by what people are afraid of, but by how many people they kill each year. The final 2 competitors are bees and white-tailed deer. And though a bunch of people die each year from hitting deer with their cars, it's a weak second to the number of people who die from bee stings. Snakes, bears, wolverines don't even figure into it.

I bring this up, believe it or not, in response to the big hoohah going on about the security stuff in the airports. Everything you do every day affects the risk you expose yourself to. The safest way to live is to not get out of bed. And stay out of the kitchen and bathroom, the most dangerous places in the house. And anyone who pays attention knows that the most dangerous action they take every day is to get in a car and drive somewhere.

All of life is about risk management. We take calculated risks every day. And it is impossible to anticipate what sorts of risks one will face on any given day. In fact, anticipating future risks is nearly impossible, because life is complicated and there too much noise and distraction for anything to be clear. So we end up trying to avoid the last thing that happened to us, since we don't know what's next.

And that's just what's happening at airport. Every new security measure is put in place to prevent what has already happened. I understand, but does anybody really think that someone else is going to now do exactly what the last person did? And what exactly are we preventing? Preventing methods of terrorism isn't the point. It's acts of terrorism that we're trying to stop.

OK. Time to have lunch. But not on a plate because I broke one yesterday.

We have a houseguest

Having someone staying in your house is sort of like an organism having an infection, except instead of antibodies and white blood cells engulfing the visitor you envelop them in food, chit-chat and entertainment instead.

Really, as an adult, your main goal when you have a houseguest is to avoid having the visitor leave your house shaking their head and muttering, "Wow, I thought I knew those people, but they're weird."

So how do you avoid that? Every family develops its own quirks, and how do you keep them away from the interlopers? It requires a certain amount of observation of so-called normal people and then a serious self-examination to see how your life differs from the norm.

You notice things and ask yourselves questions you never ask, like do we have too much junk food in the house? Is the refrigerator inappropriately full or empty? Is there too much beer? Is it strange that the liquor cabinet is locked or is that just what parents of teenagers do?

Do we speak in a dialect that only we understand? Do we talk to our pets as if they are people and people as if they are pets? And how many cats is too many anyway?

Is the house too dirty? Too clean? Does the house smell funny? Do we keep the thermostat at a level that is not well-suited to human beings? Has the decor been updated since we moved here 20 years ago? Is that okay? What is that thing on the windowsill? Who is that picture of, anyway? Does the visitor know him? How long has that been there? Is it okay to have ______ in the middle of the _______? Can you turn the TV on without an instruction sheet?

Is 6 kinds of coffee excessive? Do we really need that much butter? mustard? eggs? mayo? capers? How many kinds of pasta could one really need? If we have 12 is that okay?

You answer as many of these questions as you can and either breathe a sigh of relief, panic, or enter a state of unease somewhere in between. Somewhere in self-image limbo. It's a relief when they arrive.

Mischief not managed

My daughter was shooting rubber bands around the house, which reminded me of my fun summer in 1979. I had been accepted at the oh-so-prestigious Wharton School in the spring and was pretty much just killing time until September. I was no longer working at the regular job I'd had for the past year and a half, so first I went on a cross-country trip and when I got back I started working at copy shop (like a Kinkos) around the corner from my apartment on 2nd Avenue and 83rd St. This was only a part-time job, so I looked around for something else, and answered an ad in the paper for a place called Aspen Systems.

At that time, there was only one phone company, and its monopoly was being broken up by a series of lawsuits, among other things. Part of the process involved uncovering evidence of anticompetitive behavior. The would-be phone companies successfully subpoenaed all relevant documents from Bell and vice versa, and both sides reacted the way any rational company would; by sending every single document they could photocopy, relevant or not. Enter Apsen Systems.

I don't remember which side Aspen was working for, but they had 3 floors of a half city block-sized building, On my floor, there were no offices or even cubicles, just a sea of desks as far you could see, in one huge room with a high ceiling. They filled these desks 24 hours a day with people with 2 or more years of college, sorting through documents, looking for anticompetitive language. I was on the swing shift, 4PM to midnight.

Since none of us knew enough to actually analyze, we were given a list of keywords that might relate to the lawsuits, "competitor," or any other word with "compet" as a root, and so on. We were to note these on the sheet that came with each numbered document. We were given a pile of 100 pages of documents held together with a large rubber band to code, and when we finished we were given another pile. They were then shipped off to another department that checked our work and if we'd done it correctly we never saw them again.

About 3 weeks into this job, I found out that we had a quota of 180 pages per shift. By this time, it was taking me about 2 hours to do double that. There was no point in doing much more. Being too productive meant they'd make you a checker, which was harder and paid the same. So I had to do something, so I settled on mischief.

Propriety prevents me from going through all of the mischief, but let's just say that I behaved in a less than mature manner, and nobody ever asked me what was in my thermos bottle. My favorite activity involved the rubber bands. These were beauties, 6 inches long before you stretched them and thick enough to not break even extending them an arm's length.

You have to imagine what this place looked like- a square probably 150 feet on each side, filled with nothing but rows of desks. My best friend there sat 5 desks in front of me, so I couldn't nail him with a rubber band without endangering the people in between. So what I learned to do was fire the rubber band at the ceiling, where it would hit and then drop straight down. Within a few days, I could drop a rubber band on the desk of every person in my coding group. This was doubly enjoyable because it was a display of skill while being disruptive with the bonus of not injuring anyone.

How did they discipline me for this behavior? They offered me a promotion, which I refused, of course.

What constitutes creepiness?

I needed to change a train reservation, and since you can't do that on the Amtrak website, you need to call their 800 number. When you do that, you get Julie, the automated agent. She asks you some questions to either do what you need done or shuffle you off to someone who's more of a human being and can do a somewhat larger variety of things. I have a friend who really likes to scream at the automated agents as if they're furious at them, or speak with a totally sarcastic tone or whatever, depending on her mood. I just try to get through as quickly as I can.

This time, the agent tells me that she lives in the same town as me, actually the neighboring town. This is an unusually familiar thing for a phone agent to say, but what she said next was even odder. She said she knew where I lived because she used to work at UPS and had delivered packages to my house. This seemed ever so slightly creepy to me. I often enjoy goofing around with phone reps, because I know their job is boring and repetitive and everyone deserves to have a a little fun in their day. But usually these people are bound and determined (and often required by work rules) to keep themselves completely anonymous. This seemed just a tad inappropriate.

It got me thinking about how different commerce is now. Not that long ago, you knew almost everyone you bought stuff from. It was one of the nice things about being from a place as opposed to being transient. In my local dealings, I still know almost everyone I interact with and I like it that way. I go out of my way to add a little bit of real conversation to every interaction, whether I know the person or not, because I think it's a nice thing to do and it makes people feel good. Now we do most of our business in a completely impersonal way- big stores, phone, online, and we expect and want it to be impersonal. As someone pointed out to me, this is at least partly because they know who you are, have your address and credit card number, and you don't have a clue who they are.

I guess I don't care whether my shopping is personal or impersonal, but I think the comfort level comes from there being some apparent symmetry to the relationship. It can't be personal on one side and impersonal on the other. It violates some form of social contract to interact as equals, whether that means as numbers or as people. It also reinforces the notion that there are people out there who know stuff about you. And yeah, I find that a bit creepy.

Where I spent my morning

While my daughter was not having fun at Funplex this morning, I went to a place called Centerton Square in Mt. Laurel. Here's a nice aerial view. Just to give you a sense of scale, it's about 3/4 mile long and 1/4 mile wide at its widest point. Maybe someone who likes math more than me can estimate the number of parking spaces. My favorite physical feature is the road that goes all the way around the back. I saw cars going back there trying to exit the place. Don't think that worked out too well. And notice the Acme across the street from Wegmans. I wonder whose idea that was?

Does this not look like the least inviting thing in the world, even if you like to shop? Does so-called convenience matter so much that you're willing to subject yourself to a place like this? I sure hope I never find myself there again.

A couple of asides- Mt. Laurel seemed pretty flat for something with "Mount" in its name. Also, why would a camp have their reunion at a place like Funplex, which is just a huge arcade with a bowling alley in it? Isn't the point of a reunion to be able to catch up with people you haven't seen for a while? How are you supposed to carry on a conversation in a place like that? Give me the bar/bat mitzvah-style reunion any day.

Notes from the AP

This morning I went to an AP Calculus Workshop. Let me start by saying that yes, there really are things I'd rather be doing at 7:45 on a beautiful Saturday morning than driving to a local high school and sitting in a classroom for 7 hours. I did manage to convince myself that although there are lots of things about Calculus that I don't remember, that I wouldn't be the biggest bonehead there. This is an advantage to being arrogant, a characteristic I keep under wraps most of the time, but which I can fetch out of my mind's closet when I need it.

We get to the room, which was just your basic public high school classroom (History, I think) and the instructor gave us a fat booklet and pointed to a list of questions that we were supposed to work on. This was exactly what I didn't want to do- work. I just wanted to sit there passively and have knowledge stuffed into my brain, you know, like a regular student. But work I did. I even surprised myself a bit with what I could do.

Then we started to introduce ourselves. We found out that there were two people sitting next to each other, and one had taught the other in high school. I found out that a local high school has at least 2 teachers teaching AP Calc who had never taught calc before. Another woman who wanted to be the first non-white-male in her high school to teach AP Calc.

Then our instructor told us about what it's like being a grader (or reader, as they're called). They all go to a convention center somewhere and about 800 teachers sit around tables and grade the same problem on hundreds of papers. This reminds me of a job that I had for about 2 months in between when I was accepted to Wharton and when school started. Remind me to talk about Aspen Systems sometime.

There's apparently a whole hierarchy of graders- up to "Chief Reader." Their goal is consistency. Fairness enters into it not at all. The College Board pays for everything, but she said the cafeteria food gets really boring, and if you're a normal person who wants to get anything from the vegetarian food line gets shooed away for not being a "registered vegetarian." I have many friends who are vegetarians, and I do wish they had to register, because sometimes you don't want to go out to eat with them.

After an hour of this we started going over problems and she would explain how they were graded. It's pretty interesting and I think I understand it well enough to explain it. The rest of the day was doing math problems and talking about them. I don't really like math that much, but considering there were several unfamiliar things at least I learned something. And I got 0.6 credits toward something with initials that I don't know what it is.

I did mean to say on the survey sheet afterwards that they really need to have coffee at lunch. Going back into the classroom for the final 2 1/2 hours was pretty brutal and being half asleep didn't help much. I also remembered, too late, that last time I went to one of these things I brought a seat cushion because sitting in those hard plastic classroom seats hurts your butt after a couple of hours.

Oh, and the name of supposedly the best Calculus teaching wiki? Designated Deriver.

Is bullying a symptom or the disease?

I promise the next thing I write will be lighter.

When I was writing about bad language the other day, I didn't know what exactly what was going on in the assembly in school, but I did have an inkling. I'm glad we did that exercise. I think when anthropologists are studying the history of American culture, they will look at the turn of the millenium as the point where meanness became one of the most prominent aspects of American life. They'll look at media content and trends and whatever else it is that anthropologists do. And they'll see a thread of nastiness that is unmistakable.

It's kind of depressing to see, really. I've lived through a decent variety of national moods, but this is possibly the worst I've seen it. Teenage bullying is just a symptom, because you can see adult bullying all the time in political discourse and other places. But really the larger question is why and what, if anything, can we do about it?

In my usual rigorous manner, I will now make a definitive statement without anything to back it up. This is a skill one learns in advertising. Not in the ads themselves- there you have to back up any claims you make- but in the selling of your ideas and your importance to the success of whatever you're advertising.

My sense it that there are several concurrent trends that are leading us down this path. We'll start with the automobile and the rise of suburbia. I don't want to mythologize city life, but when you're thrown together with people all the time, every day, you learn to live with them- even the ones you don't like. There's a commonness of place that connects people and being squashed together requires cooperation (try to imagine walking down 5th Avenue at rush hour if nobody made any effort to get out of anyone's way). In the burbs, everyone's in their own little space. And the rise of the car as the primary mode of transportation has been a horrible mistake on so many levels that I can't even start to enumerate the reasons why, (just a few examples- air pollution, traffic fatalities, and the overall crappy way divers treat other drivers). But as a social influence, the way driving isolates drivers from everything and everyone around them is pernicious.

Let's add in more and more home video entertainment- cable TV and video games- and the Internet, and I think you can see a culture in a place where everyone is isolated in their own little bubble, mistrustful of anyone from the "outside" and intolerant of any kind of shared responsibility for making sure things go well. It's like in the 2000 Year Old Man, when Carl Reiner aska about caveman life, and the Mel Brooks says that every cave had its own national anthem. "What was yours?" says Reiner. "Mine was, 'May they all go to hell except Cave 57.'"

Good thing we've come so far since then. The next question, of course, is how do we fight societal trends like this?

Washing your mouth out with antibacterial liquid soap.

I was driving to school today and a song on the radio had a chorus that repeated over and over, "I'm just #%&@ing everything up." I'm the first to admit that I've felt this way from time to time, but it's not really the kind of thoughtful sentiment that I'm used to getting in alt rock. It also reminded me of a discussion a few of us were having recently about the increase in the amount of foul language that we've been hearing around.

When I worked in advertising, it was rare to hear a sentence spoken without some kind of profanity. It was just the way everyone talked and I kind of liked it. And I'll even admit that my inner dialogue has a fair share of unprintable words. But I decided quite a while ago that using swear words indiscriminately is just laziness.

An easy, quasi-swearish example is "sucks." Now let's ignore for the moment that this particular non-leech-related use of the word is a reasonably graphic reference to oral sex. What really bothers me is how when you start using it a lot, it becomes generic in meaning, like "is very bad." And when you use it repetitively you lose all the nuance available to you when you insult something or someone. In the books of famous great quotes, there are probably more insults than anything else. When that woman said to Churchill accusingly, "Mr. Churchill, you are drunk!" and he replied, "Yes madame, and you are ugly. And in the morning I will be sober," it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if he'd replied, "You suck." And calling someone an a-hole isn't nearly as interesting as calling them a snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings.

When you substitute one word for many available words or expressions, you cheat yourself and whoever's listening. It gets repetitive to the point of losing its meaning. It's fun to listen to those people on "Jersey Shore," who operate with a vocabulary of about the same breadth as Go Dog Go, but you probably don't want to talk like them. So I guess my objection to profanity is that it encourages lazy thinking, but almost as bad as that, it's boring.

On a personal note, when I feel the need to genuinely swear, I take my guidance at home from the father of Jean Shepherd, writer and narrator of "A Christmas Story." This is from his (fantastic) book of depression-era vignettes, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, on which the movie was based.

My father was always a superb user of profanity, but now he came out with just one word, a real Father word, bitter and hard. "DAMMIT!"

Consequences or Truth (remix)

I wrote this a few months ago, but I re-edited it and thought it might be interesting to some.

All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, world, there are high school seniors in a state of paralyzing anxiety, agonizing over a monumental decision. Where do I go to college next year? And of course, it's not just the students. It's their parents, friends, relatives and school guidance departments poring over facts and figures and planning visits to faraway lands (okay, I'm exaggerating- let's say rural Maine) in the search for the Right Choice. Hours of thought and thousands of dollars, all spent on the first important decision many teenagers make.

Selecting a college seems like a big decision for a young person. After all, it's what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be for the next four years and possibly more. It's their first experience away from home, living somewhat independently, meeting new people and exploring new horizons, growing in ways nobody can imagine. For many people, it's the first time they get to choose their own path. It's the Biggest Decision Of Their Life.

Or not. Maybe it's the least important decision. How could I ever say that? Because the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results for any given person at any given school with any degree of accuracy. It's weird to think that you make this huge, exhaustively researched decision and you'll probably never know if you made the right choice. But it flows directly from the old nature versus nurture question that child psychologists argue endlessly over. 

Nobody knows for sure how much of what a person turns out to be is dependent on the individual and how much comes from their environment. And if we don't know that, given the wide range of parenting styles and home situations, how are you going to glean a difference from a bunch of fundamentally similar institutions? Does it matter if you go to Middlebury versus Bowdoin, Bates, Skidmore, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Carleton or Haverford? Even comparing any of those places to "dissimilar" types of colleges like Penn State or Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly assure me that a person's life will be fundamentally better, or even different, if they chose one versus the other? It's just not possible to do so.

If there are no knowable consequences to making a decision, what kind of decision is that? If you normally make choices based on expected outcomes, on what basis are you going to evaluate this one? You simply can't, at least not in any scientific kind of way. If you talk to college students, my experience is that almost everyone likes where they're going to school, whether it was their original first choice or not. Because college is cool and college is fun, not because it's the correct college for that person.

Then how is this any more important than choosing Diet Coke versus Dr. Pepper? Of course I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for many people. I'm saying which college is inconsequential. And I understand that there are situations, like financial considerations or ultra specialized programs, where a particular choice matters. But I'd argue that these cases are a small minority.

So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? I hated where I went to college, but maybe I would have been just as immature and miserable anywhere else and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Other big decisions, like finding a job, getting married, buying a house or having kids, give frequent and often specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.

I'm convinced this craziness is all us baby boomers' fault. Not only did we create the demographics that have lowered admissions rates, we obsess over our children in a historically unprecedented way. 

I don't want to seem totally oblivious to how monumental this all seems. Late adolescence and early adulthood are important times in personal development and for some, if not all, people, college is a key time of personal growth. Just because you can't know the consequences of a decision doesn't necessarily make it unimportant, but it does mean that maybe people shouldn't be fretting about it as much as they are. Because you never know. Really, you never know.

Malled

I just dropped my kid off at the Plymouth Meeting Mall, a most peculiar place. It's not really like a mall. It's like someone took a mall and whacked it with a giant baseball bat like a pinata, and the mall stuff went spilling out all over the place. Macys here, Chicos and Olly there, movie theater here, big piece of paper mache' there left with Boscovs and a food court inside. Then they took an office building and put it in one empty space and a giant Whole Foods in another empty space. And only then did they think, "Oh yeah, we need roads to get in and out of this place." To get from the movie theater to the one and only exit I think I went north, south, east and west each at least twice and stopped at about a dozen 4-way stops. A little like driving in Boston, I guess, but that's another story.

Want some au jus with that?

My favorite lines I've heard today:

"We discussed that for ad nauseum."

"On grandparents day, my grandmother is going to be sitting right here. She's crazy, so if she raises her hand, don't call on her."

My daughter has a seminar class called Memory this year. Sounds like a great class- they're reading fiction and non-fiction on the topic and they watched Memento for homework.  And one day, one of the students brought in her mother to speak. Her mother has actual amnesia from taking a blow to the head and remembers virtually nothing from before the incident, which happened only a few years before this student was born. I always figured that amnesia, like six-pack abs, white teeth, and straight noses, was one of those things that only happened on TV or in the movies.

It's clearly more prevalent in pulp fiction, but the implications are fascinating. Within a movie, you always see the people talking just like they would have before, just they don't remember who they are. What if you didn't know what a toaster was called? How would you ask for toast, or would you even know what toast was? I don't know the answers, and I'm guessing nobody does. A movie is just a couple of hours. This woman has spent 24 years reconstructing herself. It's like 17 Again except you don't get to look (or dance) like Zac Efron.

But it isn't even just that. How much do you do every day that's routine? And how hard is it when you have to learn a new routine- new school, new job, new spouse? Really hard, right? I'm sitting here typing this now. What if I not only didn't know how to type, but didn't even know what those grey markings on the keys meant? I don't know enough about either this woman or the brain to know if the language center gets wiped out in the same way childhood memories do. And I'm not even getting into the whole question of identity.

It does give one pause, though. And it reminds you not to take things for granted.

Paving the road to hell

I was reminded today that no good deed goes unpunished. But that shouldn't oughta matter anyway, because if you're not doing good for its own sake, because it's the right thing to do, you're just pretending to be, as the Wizard of Oz says, a good deed doer.

Most everyone I know buys into the whole "do unto others" thing for the most part. I always found that too passive to be useful as a life philosophy, though. Quite a while ago I resolved myself that in every situation I touch or that touches me, that I try to leave it better than I found it. Do I always succeed? Does it always make a difference? Of course not. I've screwed up in ways ranging from trivial to accidentally causing one of my best friends and his girlfriend to break up. But more often then not, having positive intent combined with understanding yields positive results.

And making benevolent choices has its own satisfaction, whether it's helping someone reach something on a high shelf (though truth be told, I'm probably not the best person for that) or letting a car merge in front of you or giving blood or whatever. It's good for the soul and it helps a thinking person live with themselves and feel good.