Impressions in Vacuum

One thing that cracks me up about the Internet, in particular, but really, it's true of all human interactions, is the human tendency to fill in all the gaps in contact.  You really can't help it... if you're out of contact with a friend or a family member, and you think of them, you create a picture in your mind of what they're doing.  Old people do this all the time, which is how they get so many crazy notions and conspiracy theories going.  My mother is forever convinced that my brother isn't coming over because he is relaxing at home and doesn't want to be bothered with his old mother.  I can pretty much guarantee that it's much simpler than that: he has forgotten he said he'd come, or when he originally said he'd come, he said "maybe", which is guy-code for "won't" and is girl code for "I'll call you and let you know", which has caused trouble between the sexes for millennia.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been trying to learn Korean.  I don't actually know any Koreans... well, as time goes on, that statement's getting a little less true, but it's still entirely true that nobody in my daily life speaks Korean, and the Korean friends I've cultivated have many better things to do than help me practice and learn.  I do have one "study buddy" who is learning Korean with me, but she has a busy life of her own, and our contact is sporadic and mostly via email.  Sometimes, we write back and forth five times a day.  Sometimes, whole days go by without a sign of her.  She's dating a Korean-American, and he has a Korean-fluent family and community, so she has infinitely more opportunity than I do to be immersed in Korean conversation.

Anyhow, I just realized that when she's out of touch with her email, I always assume that she is in the middle of her boyfriend's family and 이모들이 (his mom's friends), practicing her conversational Korean.  It makes me feel constantly as if I'm getting behind.  It really makes me laugh when she writes to me and tells me she spent all afternoon reading some book series her brother got her into, or some such.  Once in awhile she does write and say she's been at dinner with her boyfriend's family, too, but it's certainly not at all as if that's actually how she spends every minute away from her computer.  Yet my psyche is completely bedrock convinced that's where she is every nanosecond she's not actually replying to my emails.

As part of my studying, I'm also learning from a fantastic site called TalkToMeInKorean.com (TTMIK), which has a website, a Facebook page, various staff members, sister sites that teach other languages, a whole community of students and fans.  For various reasons, I've had some interactions with them in sort of a friendly business capacity, so I have actually not only sent but received a few emails and had ancillary contact with them.

But every time I get no response to something, particularly if I've sent something to the owner that was business-related that I expected an eventual response to, I am like 45% sure I have inadvertently offended them in some way.  I know perfectly well that TTMIK says it has half a million students.  Its Facebook page has over 61,000 likes.  The owner himself has over 4,000 Facebook friends.  He just got back from a language conference trip abroad and TTMIK is preparing for some giant convention in Korea coming up... the fact that I have ever gotten a response to a comment or email actually puts me in a pretty small set.  The notion that I could interpret a lack of response as anything other than "they're busy" blows my mind.  Yet there it is... I am still worried I've offended somebody.

I really think this is just some outgrowth of our natural creature tendencies to be primarily concerned with our own well-being, and that well-being, in turn, being very dependent on our community connectivity.  But in our modern technological age, it gets pretty maladaptive sometimes.  It makes me wonder what kind of batty old lady I'm going to be -- am I going to be wandering the Internet like some kind of virtual dementia patient?  What a comical thought.  How will kindly people shuffle me back home where I belong?

안녕하세요, or: Secrets About Learning a New Language

You can stop reading right here if you think I'm about to tell you how to learn a foreign language.  Well, okay, I'll give you the one-sentence abstract: It's just like losing weight (eat less and exercise).  You study every free moment, and you tolerate insufferably slow progress until your ears bleed.  And you absolutely do not let it get to you that the delightful and beautiful young whippersnapper you teamed up with as a study-buddy can keep up with you in her "spare time" while simultaneously pulling down an "A" in her Digital Signal Processing class.  You just don't.  Competition is only good as far as it motivates you.

No, what I'm here to write about is an amazing secret world, a place where the Internet is weirdly and truly anonymous.

I'm not lying to you.  Being a bit metaphorical, maybe, but not lying in a pretty important sense.

Late last September, I decided to really study Korean.   I have Korean family members, though they themselves are "merely" Korean-American and they don't speak a word of Korean, nor do they have any inclination to do so.  Maybe they'll change their minds, maybe they won't, but the essential point is that they are actually ethnically Korean, and they can actually not do a damn thing their whole lives about being my relatives, so I have a bona fide permanent link to Korea.

And I'd like to be all noble and claim that I'm doing this for their benefit, so that when they suddenly hatch into "cultural awareness", they'll have a loving relative to lead the way.  This is true to the extent that that reasoning has made me feel my efforts have some long-term underpinnings.  But the immediate impetus for Korean study is the "Korean wave" -- Kpop, Kdramas, the junk food of Korean culture.  In the midst of a giant western recession and a significant eastern wound-licking after the Tsunami Apocalypses, not to mention some fairly expensive extended U.S. awkwardness with the Middle East, South Korea stands out as the giddy nubile teenager in the crowd.  Their pop culture right now is full of happiness, hope, energy, and affection, and it's irresistible.  I haven't been this deeply in love since Eric Estrada was in CHiPS.

So that's the back story, but what I'm writing about here is the strange Internet-cultural result.  In my attempt to learn Korean, I've signed up with a subscription service called HaruKorean -- for a nominal fee, they'll encourage you to write sample sentences, and native Korean speakers will correct your Korean.  In my actual daily life, I have almost one Korean-fluent friend (she's the wife of a colleague), and frankly, I think she should pay my subscription, and she probably would, if she had any idea how much grief this site was saving her.

I want to believe my progress with Korean is nothing short of astounding.  I know for a fact that my progress with Korean is entirely average, though perhaps I might gain some extra credit for doing it while holding down a full-time job and being middle aged.  I'm a grammar weenie, so that helps me delve into the constructs of the language, but my retention is pretty typical of a distracted adult.

This is, again, not central to what I'm here to discuss today.  You might wonder why I waste your time with irrelevancies, but if you knew me in person, you'd never wonder again.

What I'm here to discuss today is the kind of sample sentences I write on HaruKorean.  No, I don't have a secret life.  I don't have anyone stashed in the basement the police need to know about.  I just have a typical middle-aged life, full of doubts, and possibly hopeless dreams, and cranky judgments   I express all of these on HaruKorean.  I do this because I am writing in Korean, and nobody I know understands Korean, even bad Korean.  The people who correct my sentences are on the other side of the world, and I have reason to believe, from the profiles on the site and from what I know about the proprietors, that they are kind people.  I trust that they'll treat my strange little sentences-of-honesty with kid gloves, and they do.  I don't spend every sentence baring my soul, far from it.  But things I want to say, I say, without regard for whether my own family would approve.

I don't imagine that my family couldn't find this out, if they cared to.  Google Translate isn't exactly a state secret.  And my sample sentences are written on scrap paper all over my desk.  My family members certainly love me, of that I have no doubt.  But it's a fact of middle age that one's family tends to find one singularly uninteresting.  It's part of what makes middle age a time tinged with slight sadness.  They could Google me, but they won't.

The story would end there, except that I have also gotten involved in the opposite scene.  I correct English sentences for foreigners, via a different website.  It's a similar scenario; people submit sentences, and native speakers correct them.  I love doing it; my penchant for correcting people's English finally has a constructive outlet.  And I have definitely noticed the same phenomenon.  People express what they find to be rude, what they wish they possessed but don't, what they aspire to, and what disappoints them about themselves.  Far from finding this to be "juicy gossip", I react to it with affection.  I love the fact that these people will tell me (well, not me specifically, just the nameless correction team) things about themselves that are clearly heartfelt.  I have no way of knowing, of course, whether these people are this open at home.  But I suspect they aren't, or at least not with the same tiny things.  And I love them for it.

When I started learning a foreign language, I just hoped to develop a new ability and get to know a new culture.  I never expected to experience this tiny wormhole to another universe, where people can be themselves simply by stepping through to another language.  They say that learning a foreign language opens new worlds, but in this world of permanent records and accidental public life, it is wonderful to slip through a language barrier and feel, strangely, free.

There is No Relish Like Ritter Relish

Everyone has foods they remember from their childhood. A friend on Facebook just conducted a survey of foods that remind us each of our grandmothers, and I had a tough time picking just one. I have deep food love, not so much from Grandma in particular, but from my family's culinary history in general. Sentimental attachment to food is one of life's great gifts.

No food in my family's past, though, has quite the grip on us that Ritter Relish has. That's probably because nearly all of the other iconic foods in our family are made from scratch, so we have always been able to reliably re-create them and we have never had to live without them. But Ritter Relish is a commercial condiment, and when it disappeared from grocery store shelves, my family was bereft. We don't even know when it happened. Was it in the 70's? In the 80's? We tended to have several jars on hand, so it took us awhile to really understand that it was utterly unique, and it was gone for good.

Ritter Relish was a green tomato relish, and it was less sweet than ordinary American relish. My mother's maiden name was Ritter, and so we felt like Ritter Relish was our relish. We had a stock family meal that we ate a few times a month: Thomas' English Muffins, fork split and toasted, with Ritter Relish on one side, ketchup on one or both sides, maybe a fresh slice of onion, and a juicy hamburger in the middle. One big bowl of salad to share. Heaven. My father was integral to this memory; he always made the salad while Mom fried the burgers, and he loved his condiments; creating towering burgers that dripped all over the plate. He died when I was seven years old, and from that time forward, I subconsciously considered Ritter Relish to be a link directly back to memories of dinners with him.

When I graduated from college and started full-time work, I finally had enough lull in my life to fully understand what the loss of Ritter Relish meant to me. It meant I could never go home. I made me sad in ways that no other single thing could. At first I tried to just come to terms with the loss. Then, for a few years, I bought green tomato relish any time I found it, at a fair, at a store, online. It was never the same. Finally, I started experimenting with recipes. I gravitated towards old recipes, reasoning that, since Ritter Relish appeared in the 50's or 60's, it must come from vintage stock.

One year, I made a picallili recipe that was too sweet. Another, I made a Fanny Farmer relish recipe that was too spicy. But each was close enough to trigger a faint memory, so finally I combined several recipes to create something that really did remind me of the old Ritter Relish. Of course, it has been many years. I can't vouch for sure that this recipe truly brings back the original. The thing I can say is this: when I eat this relish, on a burger set on a Thomas' muffin with ketchup and maybe a slice of onion, I close my eyes, and my father is there at the table.

My family members all use no relish but this on their burgers, and for them, too, it is close enough that it brings back memories. When they run out, they ask for more. So, with no further ado, I will recopy my recipe here. It has lots of silly ingredients -- both white and apple vinegar, both cloves and allspice. It is that way because I blended several recipes, and while I'm sure it's unnecessarily complicated, I don't dare mess with it. If, like our family, you pine for the taste of Ritter Relish, give it a try, and please tell me if it reminds you of the original.

Thanks, and here it is:


"Ritter" Green Tomato Relish

4 lb fresh green tomatoes (post-frost will NOT do)
2 1/4 lb onions
1 1/4 lb sweet peppers (red & green) w/ seeds
2/3 cup coarse sea salt (for draining)
1 1/2 cup white 5% vinegar
2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tbsp prepared mustard (ordinary yellow mustard is fine)
1 3/4 tsp dry mustard (I use Coleman's)
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp celery seeds
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground allspice
3/4 tsp ground cloves
2 tbsp yellow mustard seeds

Chop veggies to relish consistency (1/4 inch dice, a food processor works fine), put in a big "nonreactive" (non-aluminum) bowl, add salt, blend, cover & refrigerate 24 hours. Drain, wash moderately w/ cold H2O (i.e. get a lot of the salt off but you don't have to go crazy), squeeze out excess water. Blend remaining ingredients in a pot, cook until sugars have dissolved. Add squeezed veggies and bring to a boil, then simmer at a good clip, stirring, for about 10 minutes until the peppers have changed color. Divide among clean 1/2 pint canning jars, leave 1/4 inch of headspace. Seal, boil 15 minutes in water bath. Cool & store at least two weeks to allow flavors to develop.

The NYC Fancy Food Show, Best Buddies, and NPR

I have a best friend. (I have a few best friends, but let's not confuse things.) Because of this best friend, I am blessed with the chance to propose crazy outings and find my suggestions met with enthusiasm. I do the same for her, so hopefully it's all relatively fair. I'll call my best friend "Ethel".

Why would I call her Ethel? Honestly, I've been wanting to use the name ever since my previous dog, Babe, wound up in the pound after getting loose from my yard. When I went to pick her up, I found that her "pound name" was Ethel. Weirdly, I could totally see where they got that. So, in tribute to the good people from the county dog pound who saved my dog when I was stupid, I shall call one of my best friends Ethel for the duration of this story.

The thing I proposed to Ethel, the springboard of this story, was a community college outing to the Fancy Food Show in NYC on June 28th. I have occasionally taken cooking classes at this college, and they were offering a one-day trip, leaving at ungodly 6 A.M. and returning at ungodly 11 P.M., up to NYC to attend this rather broadly named exhibition. I was intrigued. If there's anything in the world I like, it's food, and if people are calling it fancy, I want it. Ethel, as per our friendship agreement, enthusiastically agreed.

We had no idea what to expect. And what we encountered was different, sometimes in surreal ways, from what I anticipated. But it was an experience we enjoyed thoroughly, both for its good parts and its bad, because both contributed rich material to our store of shared experience.

It's now nearly a month later. I was attending a technical conference that let out early the other day, and because of that, I heard a story on NPR by Fresh Air about a mass grave in Afghanistan while I was on my way home. Because that story was only halfway through and had me by the ears, I turned on NPR when I walked in the house, which is rare for me. Normally NPR is strictly a car thing. Because I had it on in the house, I happened to hear a listener complaint on All Things Considered about a weird Planet Money piece pretending to stage a reality show at... the Fancy Food Show in NYC. The listener panned the piece, but I, of course, muted the radio and leapt at my computer to hear the archived segment. (Have I mentioned how deeply I love the Internet?) I listened to the half hour broadcast, which can be found here: Planet Money's Fancy Food Show Contest

The segment is, admittedly, a little trite. In particular, I thought the part about including a mythical creature was just stupid. Aside from that, though, the notion of pulling three economics stories out of the Fancy Food Show, and making a contest out of it so that the story would also include commentary from the judges about story quality... well, I thought that was quite interesting. It may seem disjoint, but to me, pondering the workings of our economy and pondering the workings of a good radio story are things of a kind, and I felt like they blended just fine with each other.

My own vote went to Adam Davidson, and during this story, I'll explain why.

Adam wrote a piece on discovering, tucked in a back corner of the food show, a long table of four or five Palestinian food distributors. I remember this table. Unfortunately, I tried none of the food, and the reason for that was simply that I was more full than I believed a human could be. Ethel and I hadn't paced ourselves at all. When we arrived at the food show well before noon, our eyes bugged out on stalks at the sight of the convention floor. There were booths as far as the eye could see, arranged in neat rows, many with nationalities displayed above, and we firmly believed that we could sample every single thing that was on offer. After all, each booth would surely only offer bite sized treats, yes?

We were in for a bit of a surprise. First of all, I had thought the word "Fancy" modified the word "Food", but we soon realized that wasn't the case. "Fancy" modified the word "Show". Much as Adam described in his piece, each booth was dolled up far beyond what I had been expecting, with rich paneling and sophisticated decorations, marble countertops, silver bowls, attractive and slightly hostile hosts and hostesses. This phenomenon was independent of the food being offered; many, many people looked down their noses at me that fine Sunday, and not a few of those people were manning booths offering rice crackers and crispbreads. We would sidle up to a booth hoping for a treat, and the booth host would look down at our badges, see we were from a community college, and don a look of unmistakable disdain. Ethel, bless her heart, was immune to this look. I, on the other hand, took to fabricating elaborate stories about the exact status of my "studenthood" and my role in the world of culinary excellence. At various times I was considering starting a business, hoping to work at an organic-foods restaurant, or planning for retirement and a second career. I couldn't help trying to make at least the occasional host doubt his snap judgment about me, though I surely fooled no one, especially when my fairy-tale-spinning led me to hand one fellow my "card" for a follow-up consultation, and he saw I was an engineer at a technical research firm.

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that nobody actually wanted us to eat their food, we did, and it turned out that if you eat bite sized pieces of everything you see, you get quite full in about an hour. Especially if the first row you walked down was mostly bread, and you didn't have the foresight to realize this was all part of a master plan to keep the neophytes from eating the expensive stuff. We actually overheard someone complaining that the real buyers must have "given all their tickets to their family members, who have all just come here to eat the food", as if that was somehow... wrong.

It didn't take us long to notice that there was something odd about the food show. In something like ten acres of booths, there was surprisingly little variety in the offerings. We joked that next year, we can save ourselves the trip: all we have to do is set up, on one of our kitchen islands, a buffet comprising a bowl of olives, some finger-sized bread, some cheese, a fruit flavored tea, some high end chocolate, and a hunk of sausage. Each time we finished, we'd have Ethel's husband rearrange the dishes and we could go down the row again. Every third pass, he'd replace the olives with some other random pickled antipasto. Every fifth pass, he'd replace the chocolate with some other kind of candy. Every tenth pass, he'd throw in a random ethnic item like honey, flavored instant rice, or anything soy flavored.

This is the first reason I liked Adam's story best: it was actually about the economics of the food show itself. It didn't take long for Ethel and me to begin wondering aloud what the Fancy Food Show was really all about. Who were really the customers of this show? We tried to picture exactly what sort of business would cross half the continent to taste a hundred different varieties of only eight foods. Sometimes, we'd get a glimpse, maybe a prim looking woman wearing a Whole Foods badge. We'd occasionally see two business-suited people sitting together at a side table earnestly discussing matters over someone's stern leather organizer. But such sightings were rare; mostly we appeared to be amidst an enormous number of exhibitors eating each other's food. So, while I didn't try any of the food at that back-corner Palestinian display, I appreciated Adam's explanation of what on earth those people were doing there, what they hoped to gain from exhibiting at the convention. I think he characterized the intended audience as restaurant suppliers and food distributors. In other words, not chefs and cooks and caterers, but the people who supply them; not the people who taste and eat the food, but the people who ship them the food. Which meant, perhaps, that the overriding criterion for whether a food fit in at the Fancy Food Show was its bulk shippability. This is what jars of pepperoncini and fancy gift chocolate have in common; they are things one might want to buy in bulk and resell. This is why the occasional spice display didn't feature its products by preparing delectable imaginatively-curried chicken bites; delicious chicken bites say "yum", not "ship me!" Instead, they displayed their spices dry, in bowls, because their potential customer puts flavor much farther down the list of must-haves than Ethel and I did.

The second thing I liked about Adam's story was the bit where he told the Palestinian Bugle-imitator that his chips were very good, when they were in fact horrible. This turned out to be quite a problem for Ethel and me. Neither one of us wanted to be rude to any of the booth proprietors, so we were loathe to admit to anyone's face that we didn't like their product. But it soon became woefully apparent that we had limited space in our stomachs, so if one of us tried a sample, it was imperative to know whether said sample was actually worth the stomach space it occupied. Many times, one of us would say complimentary things about a taste of whatnot, and that would lure the other of us into trying it, and then only after walking away would it become apparent that neither of us had enjoyed the experience. Later in the afternoon, when stomach-space considerations got dire, we finally decided we needed a code. We agreed that, if one of us proclaimed a morsel to be "delicious", that meant it was to be avoided.

This seemed like a foolproof plan, but it encountered an unexpected hitch. For the next twenty foods we tried, we never had to resort to the code word. They were all pretty darn good. So it was more than an hour later when we finally wound up at a Swiss non-fat chocolate energy drink booth, where I gamely tried a swig. Ethel, it must be realized, loves chocolate. In spite of the absolute deluge of chocolate products at this food show, Ethel was still interested in this Swiss drink. As I quaffed the offending beverage, I could see Ethel leaning towards me slightly, in physical anticipation of my judgment. I smacked my lips, pretended to appear thoughtful, and said, "Wow. That is delicious."

And just as the booth attendant began to look pleased, Ethel's face crumpled in visible disappointment and she plaintively said, "Awww, really?" I held my breath, because the only thing worse than Swiss non-fat chocolate energy drink on one's tongue is Swiss non-fat chocolate energy drink up one's nose. I affirmed, "Yeah, delicious!" as I wheeled smoothly away from the booth, pretending to sip appreciatively at my drink. I crossed the aisle to gain some distance and collect myself, pitched the container into the trash, and wheeled on Ethel.

"What the hell is the purpose of a code word if you're going to totally give away its meaning the second I use it??!" I hollered.

"Was I that obvious?" Ethel asked. I imitated her response and she cracked up and shrugged. "It's not like we're going to see these people again anyhow," she submitted. I begged to disagree. I am odd enough looking to be highly memorable, and I have had people walk up to me a decade after some event and describe in detail not only my presence at said event, but exactly what I was wearing. Ethel pretended to be chastened, but I could tell she was faking it.

My point is, I could totally relate to Adam pretending to like those fake Bugles. He should just be thankful he didn't have Ethel with him to blow his cover.

The final reason I liked Adam's piece best was the fact that he incorporated his mythical beast reference in Arabic. As I said at the start, I thought this story requirement was silly and extraneous, so the fact that he managed to fulfill it without annoying me with it was a stroke of genius.

I had gone to the food show fully expecting to spend my day in the Asian foods sections; they are my favorite cuisines. That's because I had envisioned steaming samples of gourmet pad thai and be bim bap and loc lac, not packaged soy crackers and brochures about freeze-dried mushrooms. The real show being what it was, it turned out that the jewel in the geode was the cheese section, with an acre of fabulous blues and gorgonzolas and washed-rind-this and goat-that. This was where Ethel and I returned after a long, long day on our feet. These were the last bites we crammed down our completely overtaxed gullets. And this was where we felt at home, because this seemed to be the most reliably welcoming corner of the exhibition.

It was good that we ended our day on such a good note, because our community college bus trip home featured a five hour ride in our wholly inadequate death-trap of a vehicle, complete with a very loud woman in the back intent on detailing her thoughts on everything from her resentment of her stepmother to her husband's shoe-insert size to her friend's upcoming wedding shower. If there hadn't been duct tape holding the emergency exit window in place, Ethel and I might have eased her through it.

Being Green During the End of Days

I'm a child of the 70's. By that I mean I was born in the 60's, and thus had many of my formative experiences during the Carter administration. Thanks for your condolences. For those of you who don't remember the 70's, or weren't alive yet, I can summarize it like this: it was just like the late 00's (only more genuine). We had a recession. We had an energy crisis. We were internationally unpopular. We were under constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Financial watchdogs were publishing dire warnings about our impending federal insolvency. The country, as a whole, had very low self-esteem. I actually wrote to Jimmy Carter and suggested that many of our problems would be solved if we scrapped the automobile and returned to traveling on horseback. The fact that I was horse-crazy had nothing to do with it, of course.

As you probably know, 9/11 and our other modern troubles have caused a real "return to religion" for many Americans. It wasn't too long after that that the field across the street from my neighborhood sprouted an Islamic school. Which was a weird thing in itself, because I felt really conflicted about it: on the one hand, I believed many Muslims were suffering bigoted societal backlash daily, finding themselves lumped in with terrorists through no fault of their own. On the other hand, I instinctively eyed the school as if it was a bomb-making den, raising my eyebrows whenever I saw lights on at night. Apparently, our psyches contain multitudes.

Not long after the Islamic school appeared, an Evangelical church began construction in the same field. Nature abhors a magnetic monopole. A year or so went by, and we watched the church rise, and we watched both the school and the church gain more congregants, and at the same time the economy was faltering, our Iraq efforts were neatly balanced between embarrassment and travesty, and "global warming" was being traded in for wholesale "climate change" because things were apparently just too awful to predict.

Right about when gas hit $4.00/gallon, three cheerful teenagers, two girls and a boy, showed up on my doorstep. They wanted to tell me that the Evangelical church was open and would be holding its first service that coming Sunday. I welcomed them to the neighborhood, and I mentioned that we'd enjoyed watching them all work together to build the church. They asked me if I thought I'd be attending. I said, "Well, I may come by for a service just to meet you and welcome you, but I'm unlikely to be a regular."

"Do you not believe in God?" asked the girl on the right.

"I certainly believe in some kind of God," I replied, "but it's probably not one that your church would recognize."

"Really? In these times, you don't think we need Jesus more than ever?"

"No, not as such. Sorry," I said.

Then the young man spoke up. "You know, the End of Times is coming, can't you feel it? With what's going on in the world, the climate, the wars? We're running out of resources?"

I smiled at him reassuringly, and said, "I won't argue with you that things are serious these days. And I understand why you're feeling as worried as you are. If you believe things are that dire, I can't really dispute it, because you may be right."

"But you don't believe it?" he asked.

"No, I don't."

"Why not?"

"Because this is just like the 70's," I said. "And after the 70's, we had such a run of prosperity and good fortune that most people don't even remember the 70's happened. Seriously, it was just like this. so it's hard for me to get too worked up about it."

All three of them just stood on my porch blinking at me. After a bit of awkwardness, I put in, "Really, welcome to the neighborhood. You have a lovely church, and I'm sure you will enjoy it very much. Best of luck to you all." That broke the spell, and they muttered goodbyes and wandered off in search of the next door.

It left me pondering, though. Any time history repeats itself, it never repeats exactly. It's always a variation on a theme. I've noticed the many similarities between then and now, but I've also noticed differences. It's hard for me to know whether these differences are real, or whether they're just the difference between the child-observer I was in the 70's and the adult-observer I am today. I was a very earnest, patriotic child. I am a more laid back and cynical adult. But it seems to me as if, this time around, we're kind of... pretending. Pretending to be worried about the environment. Pretending to have a recession.

Obviously, lots of real people have lost real jobs are are really struggling. What I'm trying to say, though, is that, in general, I get the same sense of fickle self-obsession off our "crises" as I got off the preceding glory years. People talk about economizing and cutting back, but these are the same people who just finished remodeling their entire house even though it didn't need it to begin with. They're not really economizing, they're just at a good stopping point. They're not talking about buying a bunch of townhouses to flip for easy money anymore, sure, but that talk was hot air all along. They whine about the drastic decline in their 401k's, but since most of them aren't near retirement, it's just whining. They aren't buying a new car, but that's because their current SUV is only three years old.

And "going green"? Surely I'm not the only one rolling my eyes at the faux-greennness running rampant in stores these days. I thought it was all just advertising glitz until I decided to replace my kitchen floor this year. Now, remember: I'm a child of the 70's. So while I'm attracted to the idea of buying a "green" floor, I know that the absolute best "green" move you can make is to not throw things out before they're used up. So I'm not replacing my kitchen cabinets and countertops. Or my kitchen appliances (though I realize one could have a debate about the fridge). I'm not replacing the carpet in the rest of the house even though it may only have a few years left. I'm keeping the wood foyer. So all I'm doing is pulling up my vinyl flooring, which has an intriguing mold colony growing in it, and replacing it with cork and tile flooring.

Now, to me, this is huge. This is the biggest remodeling thing I've done on my house since I moved in over ten years ago. I'm very excited about being able to get a new floor. But, the thing is, it's not turning out to be that easy. Because I don't want to do this myself, I want to hire someone to do it. And since we're all just pretending to have a recession, it has been very hard to get anyone to call me back or show up to give me an estimate. Maybe it's just my recession-proof area, but as soon as people hear I have a mere 350 square feet to redo, they practically hang up on me. The one estimate I have in hand is quite high, as if they've slapped a "tolerance fee" on, hoping I won't bother them by actually hiring them for my petty little job.

Meanwhile, I hear on the radio that people who are wanting to "go green" and "get back to basics" by growing some of their own food are hiring companies to come out and build them a garden. They interviewed a young couple who had a company come out, test the soil, till a 10 x 10 foot area, truck in more soil, pile in a few chemicals, and give planting and cultivating advice. They were happy to have paid over $1,200 for this service. Now, look, if you want to spend over a grand getting some dirt dug in your back yard, that's fine, and I hope you get lovely tomatoes. But don't try to tell me you're "economizing" or being "down to earth". I have no problem at all with you enjoying a luxurious dabble in the new fad of home vegetable gardening (which is also, by the way, a total reprise of earlier fads -- remember Victory gardens?). Just don't try to tell me the recession made you do it, or that you were motivated by your deep concern for the environment.

So you can tell I'm a little crabby. That's because, when all this gloom gathered, a whiff of my old 1970's earnestness came back to me. I hoped people really would get back to basics a little. I remember when we'd buy a new car, and all the neighbors would stop by to see it and admire it. I remember when hiring someone to do a few handyman jobs was routine, and a giant remodel was something only rich people did. I remember when lawns just had to be mostly green and mostly mowed, with a few nice flowers by the front bushes. I remember life before weed whackers and obligatory mulch.

We've come such a long way since then -- more energy efficient homes and appliances, a better awareness of our impact on the environment, a sort of democratizing of luxury -- but we had lost any sense of moderation. I was hoping that these "troubled times" would bring the moderation back into the equation, so that we could enjoy these improvements with less stress.

I fear now, though, that this all really is just like the 70's, and that now, like then, when our good intentions meet the tedious aspects of meaningful implementation, we'll declare our impatience with such drudgery and will go out and have the 80's all over again.

And I'll be stuck with this moldy vinyl floor.

We Can All Fly if We Believe

I just finished re-watching "Michael Clayton." One of the main characters of the movie is bipolar, wigs out in the middle of a deposition, continues to act nuts till his death. But of course, in the midst of his madness, there is truth to which the rest of the characters in the movie are deliberately blind. It's a pretty cool movie, and one of the things that makes it cool is this way that they've incorporated a central philosophical notion: that reality is not objective, that the observer is everything when it comes to understanding the truth. That mental health is perhaps not all it's cracked up to be.

Years ago, I read about an experiment that had been performed on two groups of volunteers, one clinically depressed, one non-depressed. They played games of chance, and after the games were over, they were asked to evaluate what their chances of winning had been during the games. The interesting result was that the depressed people rated their chances of winning much more accurately than the non-depressed people. It's depressed people who have the proper grip on objective reality, the study suggests. Not "normal" people.

How could that be? To me, it goes to the nature of "reality". If reality is an objective truth, then observing it accurately should be the optimal strategy. But science has taught us that species that flourish do so because they have adaptations that give them a competitive advantage. Our "normal" tendency to overestimate our chances of success must somehow enhance our chance of survival.

And this makes sense, if you think about it. Say you're in a bind, and things really look terribly hopeless. If you assess that accurately, you're likely to just sit down and accept your fate. If you assess that inaccurately, you might think your harebrained scheme stands some chance of success and you might try it. Most of the time, you'll be wrong, sure. Squashed like bug. But every so often, you'll beat the odds for having tried. You'll win where the dude with the good grasp of reality will lose. Where all else fails, delusion is king.

This is what "mental health" really means. It means the ability to participate sustainably in the group hallucination that best meshes with the world we've built. What wrong with mental ill-health is not that it's necessarily inaccurate, it's that it's maladaptive. Reality isn't a stationary target; it's a story we're creating as we go along; it has a Heisenberg quality that exceeds its central truth. Life isn't a game of chance with fixed odds. Believing unreasonably in your chance of success helps foster your chance of success.

But it's easy to slip from that notion to the fallacy that mental ill-health is some form of inspired wisdom. Mental ill-health comes in all forms. Maybe depressed people can rate games of chance accurately. Maybe manic people can tap into arteries of courage and hope and energy the rest of us couldn't hope for. Maybe schizophrenics can see patterns in the world around them that are subtle and sublime. Where any of these perceptions stand in relation to some mythical (in my opinion) objective reality is immaterial. The center of the mental bell-curve is where it is because it is the human race's hard-won best survival strategy. It is as built in to our biology as are our fingers and toes.

However, that, also, is no static truth. Today's mental health is today's survival skill. In times of upheaval, of great global shifts, when the center's strategy suddenly starts to fail, it'll be the outliers who will flourish. Who knows, some millenia from now, if we survive that long, "mental health" might be defined completely differently than it is now.

Fitness Program for 40 lb. Dogs

The dog and I have a routine that she dearly loves: whenever I get a chance to lounge on the couch for awhile in the evening, I will put little bits of dog treat in a treat ball, and the dog will roll it vigorously around the floor to get all the treats out. Then she'll bring it back to me and hand it to me, and I'll refill it, and she'll re-roll it, and that'll repeat four or five times until I think she's had enough treats. Then I'll take the ball away from her and hand her one last treat, indicating that the game is over. Usually she understands this and settles down.

But last night, I was doing some paperwork on the couch, so I was sitting there for much longer than normal, and the dog grew impatient to play the game again. When she wants me to start the game, she "berfs" at me -- this very tiny imitation of a bark that she uses to get my attention. "Berfing" was initially a really good way for her to comment on things without barking, so I've always encouraged it, but it has become sort of obsessive in the last year -- sometimes she'll sit in the family room and just berf to herself, which is pretty distracting. She can really keep it up far in excess of my patience, and last night she "berfed" at me for about 50 minutes straight -- about every ten minutes I'd give her a long speech about how she had already played treat ball, and it wasn't good to snack all evening, and it wasn't good to get so in the habit of "berfing" that you don't even notice you're doing it, and for those speeches, she would politely shut up and listen, but then a few moments later, she'd get back to it.

Finally, she figured out it wasn't working (thank GOD). Then, since she didn't have access to the treat ball itself, she decided to try bringing me other things. She brought me her tennis ball. She brought me her marrow bone. She kept repeating this -- I'd take the bone from her and admire it and give it back to her, and she would consider it to see whether I had perhaps put some peanut butter on it, and then she'd take it for a lap around the room (to refresh its powers, I presume) and offer it to me again. Finally, I started ignoring the offerings, and she went a few rounds of just placing it hopefully on the floor at my feet, waiting a moment, then picking it up and "refreshing" it with a lap around the room and placing it at my feet again.

I was working busily away when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that she was carefully placing something new at my feet. It wasn't her ball or her bone; it was bright blue. I stopped what I was doing to look down, and there at my feet sat my five pound exercise barbell. It has a tough sort of "nerf" coating that lets her get a decent grip on it, I guess, and I suppose she thought this yeoman's effort would serve as a heroic last ditch attempt. When I started laughing, I could tell she thought she had hit paydirt, and I know it was very hard for me not to give her treats for her inventiveness. I resisted, but I did congratulate her heartily, and then I put the barbells away so I don't wind up with a toothless dog!