Duting my initial survey of the office I now work in, I came across this box:
No sandwiches, either.
I have honestly been having a really hard time putting into words precisely how this sign made me feel. It’s been bothering me. And after literally hours of musing on and off, and several failed attempts at writing it up, I realized it was simple — I felt deeply and abidingly suspicious that there were in fact some fuses in that cabinet. And I felt compelled to tell it that okay, okay, whatever, I believed it.
I mean, why would a cabinet that didn’t have fuses in it need a sign saying so?
In fact, come to think of it, why do we put signs on things at all?
We label things when two conditions are satisfied:
There is a cost associated with people not knowing the information
The information isn’t plain to see
For example, take “CAUTION: HIGH VOLTAGE”, and other warnings. The cost of not knowing about the high voltage is a potentially lethal shock. And electricity is invisible. Sure, let’s let people know about that.
With something like “Recycling: Plastics and Glass Only”, the cost of not knowing is recyclable materials might be put in landfill or inappropriate materials might contaminate the recyclables. And it’s not possible to know where some bucket will be carted off to without some indication. So that makes sense.
But this NO FUSES business? Granted, unless you have x-ray vision, you wouldn’t be able to tell without opening the cabinet that there were no fuses in it. But what’s the cost of someone not knowing that in advance? In order for it to make any sense, there has to be some consequence to being wrong about the presence or absence of fuses in that cabinet. So it’s possible that there used to be people who were desperately looking for fuses all the time, and they couldn’t afford the precious seconds looking for them in the wrong place. But then why don’t I see that sign on everything that doesn’t have fuses in it?
Or maybe there are many more people than I would think who under no circumstances want to see fuses. Like maybe fuses killed their parents. And that sign is just to let them know that it’s totally safe to open that cabinet without their having to confront the painful past.
Of course those two scenarios are absurd. Consequently, failing to come up with a way to reconcile that sign’s message with the two requisites for rational signage, I cannot take it at face value. The most obvious conclusion is that the sign is trying to deceive me. Because fuses were in high demand in that office, but the fuses in that cabinet were already being used for something important. So in order to keep people who would go to any length, no matter how nefarious, from stealing fuses that were already in use, someone put up a sign that claimed that cabinet had none. Crazy? Definitely. But, not as far fetched as what I’d need to believe to think that there really weren’t any fuses in there.
Maybe the sign is trying to be sarcastic. What do you think? What could possibly explain that sign? Oh, and no, I haven’t yet checked inside the cabinet.
I came across this collection of arguments for legalizing pot a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that while all of the essays are good, I find former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper’s essay to be the best (it’s the last one). He begins:
Any law disobeyed by more than 100 million Americans, the number who’ve tried marijuana at least once, is bad public policy. As a 34-year police veteran, I’ve seen how marijuana prohibition breeds disrespect for the law, and contempt for those who enforce it.
I watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk a year ago, after my uncle J sent around a link to an article in the NYTimes called A Superhighway to Bliss. In her talk, she recounts how she experienced nirvana while having a stroke in her left brain.
A few weeks ago the topic came up again on a mailing list, and I linked the talk to the group. I insist that you watch the first 3 minutes (out of the total 20) right now — I bet you will not hit pause.
I watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk a year ago, after my uncle J sent around a link to an article in the NYTimes called A Superhighway to Bliss. In her talk, she recounts how she experienced nirvana while having a stroke in her left brain.
A few weeks ago the topic came up again on a mailing list, and I linked the talk to the group. I insist that you watch the first 3 minutes (out of the total 20) right now — I bet you will not hit pause.
T, one of the people on the list, and a psychologist, said that Ms. Taylor was describing psychosis, and that while we learned much from her description of her experience, to aspire to that state was to aspire to psychosis. This set me to thinking, and led me to articulate for the first time some thoughts I’d had on this topic.
I see the message of her talk as grounded in a very difficult philosophical point which relates to T’s reaction that Jill Taylor was describing psychosis. The definitions you find of psychosis all root in abnormal states of mind, in which contact with reality is lost. Well, the purely right brain experience that Ms. Taylor was having was in no was disconnected with reality. Not in the way a physicist would describe reality. Her right brain was unaffected by her stroke, and continued to be just as connected to reality as it ever was. The reality from which she was separated, and from which those with psychoses are separated, is the consensual reality that all of us with left brain dominance dwell in, in which “we” end at the borders of our skin.
Where “we” stop and the outside world begins, however, is not cut and dry. Is the air in your lungs at this moment part of you? What about the urine in your bladder which you have not yet eliminated? The digested food in your stomach? The water in the glass you are about to drink quickly becomes the cerebrospinal fluid in your brain. At what point does it become “you”?
To be sure, a human without left brain function, incapable of conceiving of themselves as individual and separate from the rest of the matter and energy in the universe, is maladapted. We have invested a lot of evolutionary energy into that left hemisphere way of perceiving reality, and it has paid off rather well, in that we can build cities and study dentistry and live longer. But we also know that adaptations which pay off in some ways can be detrimental in others. Many of the way our bodies manage nourishment were evolved when food was scarce, and are actually detrimental now. The adaptation to stand on our legs has freed our hands to use tools, but ruins our backs and our knees.
So would be the case with our development of a left brain mindset. It precedes and enables all of our thinking, but cuts us off from one another and the universe at large, prevents us from experiencing that bliss. Call it expulsion from Eden, if you will.
This is the insight of which she speaks — that the notion that we are all connected, all one, is not just some hippie-dippy way of expressing aspirations for peace and coexistence. It is in fact the unadulterated truth; and merely perceiving it at all, even if we cannot live in that state of mind perpetually, has immediate, powerful, and positive consequences for our way of viewing the world, and our actions in it.
Think about the notions of beautiful and ugly. In particular, the way that the people you love become beautiful in your eyes. It reveals something about the different things we pay attention to depending on whether we’re regarding something new or something familiar. For most examples I discuss in this post, I will refer to people, but later maybe I can explore how this might apply to things as well.
A related aside: many years ago I had a brief conversation with a woman I had just met that evening. I honestly no longer remember where and when, or even the rough context of our meeting. At a friend’s party is about as far as I’d be willing to venture. In any case, the conversation was about wrinkles on your skin, in particular on your face. She was fretting about them. Now, I have always been dismayed by what I perceive to be a general and pervasive anxiety about the effects of aging that affects women, in particular, acutely.
People should be comfortable with the lines time draws on their faces, because those lines aren’t random cruelties of aging. They are directly caused by the expressions we put on over the course of our lives, In that sense, they are our personalities made manifest.
But this post isn’t about the whys and wherefores of the aging complex and gender. I just remember that I offered her a viewpoint that I hope I can maintain as time begins to show on my skin: that people should be proud of the lines in their skin, because they are a history of their emotional life. As my friend L. once said, “we’re made of the same stuff as everything else.” End aside.
When you look at someone unfamiliar, by definition, you can only see what’s on the surface. What strikes people as beautiful or ugly in an initial impression are the aesthetic markers — symmetry, ratio, cultural norms, etc. Sometimes familiarity with people can grow very quickly, but it’s a process. This surface-only perception is even more primary when a person’s expression is neutral — at that time, all you can see is the prettiness or ugliness of their “outer face”.
So, what’s the “inner face”? You can’t see it all the time, at least at first. When it’s visible, it sits on the landscape of the outer face. It is the thing that you find either beautiful or ugly in people that you know. It’s the collection of expressions that, because you are familiar with the person, you associate with traits of theirs, positive or a negative. A furrowing of the brow when they are concentrating that you associate with their pleasantly contemplative nature. A tilt to their lips that you associate with an unfortunate tendency they have to think of themselves as superior.
The inner face is a dynamic manifestation of who a person is. After a while, you may stop seeing the outer face of some people completely. Even when you regard the most neutral image of that person, you are still seeing that face’s potential.
To bring the aside back around, aging kinda puts your inner face on the outside, as time etches into your skin the evidence of all your expressions.
When did this use of the term “gentleman” appear? Why did that term, rather than any other, come to be the accepted euphemism? Was “men’s” already taken? That’s what popped into my head when I saw this awning.
That and: is it really possible to walk into a strip joint and think, as you pass under the “gentleman’s cabaret” sign, “Yes. Yes, I am a gentleman, and that, more than anything else, is what defines me in this place. That is the quality that is common to all the men present — we are gentlemen, one and all.”
And yet I don’t detect any trace of sarcasm, or even irony, in this usage.
Further reflection clarified things for me, though. It’s relatively recent that gentlemen are thought of as “well-mannered” men. The original meaning was “high-born”, or ’’well-born” or “noble”, and yeah, we’re talking about men with power, not graces. Although obviously the two certainly go together since social graces are codes for recognizing people of sufficient station to mingle with you.
Now that we don’t put nearly as much stock in older notions of born and bred nobility, one can “act like a gentlemen” and we understand that to mean that one is conducting one’s self in a respectable manner. I think I’ll have to save for another discussion how a similar thing has gone on with the term “noble”.
In any case, it’s clear that “gentleman’s club” originated because men with power like to be attended to by scads of hotties.
Which leaves me giggling about the contrast between the modern sense of the term and what behavior I expect out of the crowd inside the club. I don’t think they’re wearing top hats, for one thing. Those things get knocked off when a stripper knocks about your face with her shaking breasts.
I love fine distinctions. Like the one between prejudice and bigotry, or the one between clever and stupid.
