brains think the darndest things

I have heard it said (and debunked and said some more) that we humans only use some 10% of our brains. Have you ever had one of those moments when you suddenly, unexpectedly became aware of your brain and all the things it does when you're not paying attention? The fact that I'm having a hard time even phrasing that question suggests to me that I should probably illustrate what I mean. So, what follows is a list of curious things I have learned about my brain and how it processes reality, for better or for worse.

Fun fact #1: My brain thinks no one can recognize me if I'm wearing my glasses. I believe this in spite of the fact that it is patently ridiculous. I have no trouble identifying other people who normally don't wear glasses if I chance upon them with glasses on, or vice versa. Why would my brain think that my identity could be more transformed by glasses than anyone else's?

How I noticed: I had been waiting tables in a diner and some regular customers didn't know who I was. At the time I attributed this to the fact that I had stopped (started?) wearing glasses since the last time I had seen them. This situation recurred, in one form or another, for several years. In retrospect, I am forced to conclude that I am just not that memorable.

Fun fact #2: My brain perceives the wearing of earrings as a sign of competence. Whenever I am wearing earrings, I feel more self-possessed, connected to the world, and ready to confront unfamiliar circumstances.

How I noticed: Standing on a subway platform in NYC. I was a bit lost and felt like a conspicuous tourist, and then I remembered: I was wearing hoop earrings. Clearly, I belonged here and was in full command of this situation. I remember thinking something irrational like "Everything's fine. You're wearing hoop earrings. You've got this."

Fun fact #3: With the right encouragement, my brain is very good at identifying and synthesizing important pieces of information in a hurry.

How I noticed: I arrived at the train station in downtown Montreal four minutes before my train was supposed to leave. I had never been there, and it was a sprawling, bustling, multi-storied building...yet I still made my train. I told my brain "your train is here and so is the information that will guide you to it. Find." My eyes sought and found the relevant arrivals and departures board, then pin-balled from arrowed sign to arrowed sign with my body in tow until I just strolled into the right train car headed toward the right destination moments before we pulled out of the station. I've since been able to repeat this experiment in turning myself over to my brain's command with almost uniform success. This is why I am in charge of all the snap decision-making in my marriage.

Fun fact #4: My brain thinks that because it speaks two languages, it speaks all languages. I speak fluent English and Spanish, and have a smattering of French and vestigial German from minoring in it in college. My brain gets really irritated when I overhear someone speaking anything that isn't one of those languages and continues to struggle impotently to understand.

How I noticed: I was in the grocery store and heard some gentlemen conversing in Hebrew. I couldn't quite accept that I couldn't understand them, and just about wore myself out trying to make sense of what they were saying. It's a wonder that I didn't get kicked out of the grocery store for following them around and (not very effectively) eavesdropping on their conversation. I have also witnessed several situations in which people are having a hard time communicating due to a language barrier, and been tempted to step in and say "I'll handle this", only to discover that I have no better linguistic or extra-linguistic tools than the actual participants in the conversation. I suppose it's true that my odds are better than many people's, but still... seriously, brain? Who do you think you are?

Fun fact #5: My brain inherently trusts the prematurely balding. This is either a genius insight into the human soul, or potentially perilous. Regardless, combined with Fun Facts #1-2 and 4, it would make me an exceptionally crummy secret agent.

How I noticed: I have actually written about this episode before, somewhere, and maybe I can even look it up for you, although I probably won't, but suffice it to say that it's probably a miracle that I'm still alive. I was stumbling around Veracruz, Mexico, trying to overcome the previous night's food poisoning armed with nothing but a digital camera, a bottle of Gatorade and the sheer force of will, when I decided to take a break from the oppressive heat by slumping against a heavily-graffitied wall in a somewhat secluded part of downtown and laying my head against the cool concrete. A young man in a baseball cap approached me and tried to convince me to come home with him, because I was green and obviously foreign and dehydrated and lost under the midday sun and it was about 97 degrees out. This (yes, this part, specifically), I thought, was a bad idea. I spent what was left of my energy trying to get him to go away and leave me alone, when after about 20 minutes he ripped off his baseball cap in frustration. I immediately noticed that at age 27, he had lost nearly all his hair. "Oh," my brain said. "In that case." I went home with him, and he introduced me to his grandmother, and we ate pineapple and listened to the radio for a while.

Although it doesn't happen often, I really enjoy it when my brain makes itself so transparent to me. I depend on it pretty heavily because, like many people, I think for a living. When my brain declares its independence from me in these little ways, I get to remember that it and I are not synonymous. It's comforting, somehow, to know that my brain isn't always empirically correct, and that other parts of me might have the right idea from time to time.

in defense of second-language curricula

It's the end of exam week, which means that Intermediate Spanish students here at Liberal Arts College USA are rejoicing that they have fulfilled their requirement and will never, ever have to take another foreign language course again. Their professors are rejoicing as well, grateful that, for now at least, we work at an institution of higher ed that still places a value on making one or another of those languages a bit less foreign.

Language programs have been significantly pruned back by universities suffering reduced federal and state funding, the most prominent example being SUNY Albany, where several tenured and tenure-track professors in the French, Italian and Classics departments were unceremoniously dismissed. Students majoring in these disciplines, meanwhile, were invited to complete their degrees at other SUNY campuses, but SUNY Albany discontinued the majors in those languages arguing that this decision affected only a handful of students. Universities and colleges around the U.S. have made similar decisions with regard to their language programs, or moved introductory and intermediate courses on-line to pare spending. This is a grave mistake.

There is simply no substitute for the time students spend in the classroom speaking an unfamiliar tongue. Language is so profoundly bound up in our sense of who we are and of the world that surrounds us that it is almost impossible for us to make sense of things without it. Here's an example: in English, we have a single word for what we generally consider an irreducible concept: corner. Yet in Spanish, the word rincónrefers to the intersection of walls where a parent banishes a naughty child's nose, while esquina denotes the edge of your sheet of paper, or the place where the sidewalk in front of your house meets the cross-street.

There. I have just slightly changed your perception of reality.

What's more, for all that English possesses enough synonyms to keep Roget publishing thesauruses until kingdom come, this simple example shows that the English language is lacking when it comes to some pretty basic distinctions. How else can we account for the fact that we love strawberries, our puppy dogs, our siblings, our friends and our spouses with the same verb? In fact, although many of us are fortunate enough to form at least a provisional understanding of the concept of love over the course of our lifetimes, "I love you" is still one of the most ambiguous statements one can make in English.

I would need the Matrix - or at very least a team of neuropsychologists and a lab full of fancy equipment - to know whether a mind that distinguishes between rincones and esquinas organizes spatial relationships fundamentally differently from how my mind does; and, if so, how this translates itself into differences in what's considered appropriate personal distance in social situations or how to build a city. But I am nearly certain that my internal map of the world is different from that of native Spanish-speakers as a consequence of spending the first twenty or so years of my life never having thought about such a distinction. Contact with other languages reshapes our perception of reality, and of the reality that is available to us to perceive. Perhaps this explains why so many students have such a visceral dread of language classes, and interpret the university's second language proficiency requirement as a perverse act of abject torture - such learning is inherently uncomfortable because it strikes so close to the heart of what makes us who we are.

Most educators are agreed that requiring students to take at least a couple of courses in the humanities - in anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy - is fundamental to providing them a broad understanding of the world they inhabit. These classes ask students to think about, read about, discuss, analyze, and legitimize different ways of interpreting the world. However, they are no substitute for language classes, as language courses require students not only to consider other perspectives, but for a moment to embody them. The practice of speaking the world through another's tongue compels students to practice empathy - a skill that grows ever more urgent in a shrinking world.

the semiotics of zombies

the semiotics of zombies (ALERT: dorktacular navel-gazing ahead)

June 4th, 14:37

The other day I was listening to a review of several recent vampire-related narratives in TV, print and film. The reviewer considered that vampires reign supreme among monsters in today's creature features, and he described zombies as just a passing flavor of 2010. Not only did this reviewer myopically date the advent of zombie stories to AMC's enthralling first season of "Walking Dead" from last year; he completely missed one of my favorite film genres, which the hubs and I have taken to calling "zombedies". What of "Zombieland", David Bianculli? What of "Sean of the Dead"? Or, for that matter, "Resident Evil", the (still relatively) recent remake of "Dawn of the Dead", or "28 Days" and its sequel? You may think zombies are just the flavor of the month, but I think they will fuck your vampires' shit UP over time. Sooner or later, you will have to welcome them into the creature canon.

True, vampires have had a recent upsurge in popularity. But this is probably just a hangover from Stephanie Meyer's wildly lucrative Twilight series. Because I am pathologically incapable of putting aside even the worst book once I've started reading it, I have read all four of these. I can't believe how many of the normally self-respecting women I know will sigh and swoon over this sophomoric, co-dependent drivel. You can forgive 13-year-old girls for being on Team Edward, but anyone who has had a mature relationship and still finds this story romantic needs to have their head examined. Then again, who wouldn't fall for a pasty, narcissistic, emotionally unavailable boy who nonetheless needs her in order not to behave like a complete asshole? Plus, he sparkles in the sunshine! It's like a boyfriend and a My Little Pony all rolled into one bloodthirsty package!

I don't want to nay-say all the vampire narratives that are riding in Twilight's wake. For instance, I hear that HBO's "True Blood" is actually quite funny. I just think Bianculli is exaggerating vampires' preeminence as monster du jour. It's long been a pet notion of mine that our favorite monsters are a reflection of our deepest anxieties: thus, xenophobes fear extraterrestrials, those with significant regrets fear ghosts, those who fear their own capacity for anger are fascinated by werewolves, and so on.* Vampires have always struck me as the perfect Victorian monster, because they tap into our fear of our own sexuality and of what happens when the basest human passions are left unchecked. Zombies, however, are inherently post-modern. For those of us who are fascinated by zombies, the scariest thing imaginable is humankind's capacity for selfishness and indifference.

Think about it. First of all, zombies are often the product of a scientific experiment gone wrong or some other human intervention. In the classic zombie narrative, apathy or simple denial of the evidence are what lead to initial dissemination of the monsters. As people cluster in micro-societies seeking shelter and mutual protection, there's always some self-interested asshole who thinks s/he can do better on his/her own, as well as the guy who thinks somehow his wife is going to be a kinder, gentler zombie than everyone else's, and the whiny, cantankerous, trigger-happy hick who's utterly failing to cope: in sum, a series of individuals who let you down and gradually compromise your small group's chances of survival. This microcosm is then extrapolated over cities, nations, even continents, until no safe haven for humanity remains. By now it shouldn't be hard to see why this resonates with contemporary viewers, and with us self-reliant, can-do Americans in particular.

In short, vampires may be firmly entrenched, but zombies are also clearly here to stay.

*Bonus points for anyone who wants to advance a theory about what people who fear clowns are really afraid of.

tangovangelism

I have been fairly restrained on this subject, considering how much of my life is taken up by this activity, but I am happy to say that as of today the hubs and I have successfully tango-vangelized five people and continue to bring the good word to anyone who demonstrates so much as a passing curiosity in our argentine tango obsession, which has been going strong for five years now and shows no signs of abating. That's one convert per year since we started, and they're all still practicing believers...I wonder how we stack up against Mormons or Seventh Day Adventists. Maybe we should try hanging out at the airport, or on busy corners in Third World countries.

Tonight we have class and tomorrow, jkgeroo welcomes us into her home to try to bring her honey-love into the light. I'm a bit nervous because I know what an enraptured crank I become when I get started on tango. Tango is yoga for two, the secret to tango is the same as the secret to a healthy relationship, tango is zen, approach tango the way you would a road trip, insert metaphor of choice.

Dancing tango has changed my musical tastes, my fashion sense, my body image. It's changed how I approach conflict resolution, physical activity, and teaching and learning. It's helped me push my own limits and live in the moment (it's also given me a rock-hard spot on the outer edge of each big toe that I am pretty sure will never go away).

I'm beginning to think that there is a difference between broad pursuits and deep pursuits. Broad pursuits are those that, by nature, call for people to acquire ever greater quantities of skills, techniques, facts or things: like stamp collecting or baseball statistics or trivia night. Deep pursuits are the kind that, by nature, call for you to do the same handful of things better and better as you go, like yoga. You can bring a deep or broad approach to deep or broad pursuits, but if you bring a deep approach to stamp collecting you'll hit bottom fairly quickly, and if you bring a broad approach to yoga you'll soon wonder what the big deal about yoga is. Finding enduring satisfaction in either kind of activity calls for bringing the adequate approach to it. Some people get easily bored with deep pursuits because they need immediate payoffs - the progress in deep pursuits is often glacial and cyclical. I'm more prone to boredom with broad pursuits, because I can foresee myself eventually exhausting them without really having to interrogate anything within myself.

I'm sure you can see where this is going...I think Argentine tango is a deep pursuit. People who approach it as a broad pursuit are interlopers looking to add to their repertoire, or the chronic gancho-ers and boleo-ers (ganchos and boleos are those fancy leg hooks and flourishes you see on Dancing With the Stars) that clog up the dance floor and stiletto people in the shins. Once they've punched themselves out, they'll move on to another broad pursuit. To the uninitiated eye, tango approached deeply can look almost boring. But I can promise you: the less you see, the more is happening for the two people in the embrace.

Now that I've fallen this deep into my chosen pursuit, it's hard for me to imagine anyone not wanting to dance tango, or for that matter dabbling in it. I guess I think a satisfying life requires at least one deep pursuit approached deeply. What's yours

Ghent physics (warning: you will probably leave this post with the Eagles stuck in your head)

I need to preface this all by saying that I really love my neighborhood. I can walk to just about anything I need: coffee, stamps, a rockin' short haircut, soba noodles, fish tacos (wow, a lot of what I apparently need turns out to be food), second-hand clothes, library books, yoga, all within walking distance. For crying out loud, there's a frozen yogurt buffet a block from my house, and the block after that has an independent movie house where you can get a chai latté to go with your popcorn, with a video rental place attached that's organized by sections like "Spaghetti Westerns," "British Horror" and "Troubled Youth".

There's only one problem: it's like the fucking Hotel California. Some invisible force prevents you from ever being able to leave, and then whenever you do, you sort of wish you hadn't.

It's easy enough to get to work and back. But if you ever want to go anywhere recreationally, you had seriously better factor in some extra lead time. It's proportional to how far you want to go, too: whenever we undertake the drive from Virginia back to Michigan, we typically manage to vacate the 5-block radius around our apartment at whatever time we were shooting for plus an hour and a half or so. Because we suddenly remember we need to go to the bank, buy a baby gift, mail a letter and get another cup of coffee for the road, and even though it's all right here, right next to each other, that's just mysteriously how long it ends up taking. I can't explain it; I suspect it's just some kind of powerful magnetic field put in place to punish you for endeavoring to venture past the city limits by slowing down time and making simple tasks take far, far longer than they would normally take, perhaps in the hope that you'll give up and just say "fuck it" and go to the Donut Dinette, which is on the corner of your street, which half the time you do, and forget about whatever else it was you were going to do in some place that is not Ghent, if there even is such a place, which after a while you seriously begin to doubt.

For instance, this afternoon I was invited to Olde Town Portsmouth, which is approximately 2.5 miles away, for a drink with a friend (whom I was already somewhat considering demoting to acquaintance status, and now my mind is made up). In order to accomplish this I had to drive, but the hubs was parking me in, so I decided to take his car, which he reported was nearly out of gas. So I went to the BP station right up the street to fill it up (3 blocks south), but the BP station on our street was out of unleaded, so I had to go to a different gas station in the opposite direction from where I eventually needed to be (4 blocks east of that), and of course every stoplight between the two gas stations (4 of them) was ordered to turn red just as I was pulling up to it. So I filled up the car at the 2nd gas station, turned right back around and hit the same four red stoplights except in the opposite direction, and eventually made it through the Midtown Tunnel to Portsmouth only fifteen minutes later than expected, whereupon another series of stoplights delayed me another 10 minutes in arriving at my destination.*

I don't really want to talk about what happened when I got there. The restaurant was cozy and dark inside and the food was yummy, like what would happen if a bunch of hobbits decided to open a tapas restaurant. My friend patiently listened to me dork out about my research project, which turned out to be collateral against regaling me with the dizzying details of her increasingly creepy love life that involves internet-dating pretty much every configuration of sexual preferences available to us within our species, just before sticking me with more than my fair share of the check, and it occurs to me that "collateral" is perhaps not the proper term here, because when you think of collateral you think of something that you get back at the end of whatever it is you are doing, whereas there is absolutely no way I will ever get that hour and a half of my life back, nor the 75 bucks I laid out for gas, beer and taters, precious, and I will never be able to scrub my brain hard enough to unlearn that "poly" is internet-dating-speak for dudes who take their wives on dates with girls they meet on the internet. Nice.**

Thankfully all the traffic lights on my way back to Ghent were green. Gentle reader, I believe that the moral of this story is self-evident. And now you have the Eagles stuck in your head, and I'm actually kind of fine with that, because imagine how I feel.

*Side note: while I was fuming about this, I actually got honked at, because one of the stoplights I was sitting at waiting for it to turn green was not a stoplight at all, but instead a stop sign, and fyi those do not in fact turn green at all, but instead stay the same color the whole time (red with white parts that spell "stop").

**In case you're wondering, your alternative lifestyle, whatever it is, is fine with me, but if it's much more complicated than you like girls or you like boys or you like girls and boys, a heads-up before you start trying to tell me all about it would be ever so appreciated.

Aaaah. Mexico.

Back in Mexico. There's a smile in my Spanish when I speak here, a gentleness that overtakes me. Also, I have this heightened awareness of the absurd circumstance of being a gringa in Mexico. Mostly it feels like people regard me with a sort of bemusement, above all. Many are incredibly helpful; some seem to think that good luck rubs off of me like I'm a chimney-sweep or something; still others are just straight up curious about me. Two reporters chased me down yesterday to ask a foreigner how she celebrates Christmas, and seemed a bit disappointed when I answered that it's a time to practice a bit more good will, tolerance, patience and kindness toward others, hang out with your family, and eat. I guess my answer wasn't very exotic -- on the upside, I might wind up on the six o'clock news for all the right reasons!

Stop me if you've heard this one, or just indulge me instead: there's a game I like to play here an ex-pat friend of mine taught me. It consists, very simply, of spotting the incongruence. The theory is that, wherever you go in Mexico, at any given moment, there's something completely, totally, obviously out of place within your field of vision. A costume shop at the bus station. A truck driving along with its rear-view mirrors lit on fire in honor of the Virgen de Guadalupe. A man painted silver from head to toe. And if you can't find the incongruence, you're probably it.

Mexico assaults the senses. It's a loud, bumpy, spicy, bright place and it always smells like something, whether the sting of diesel exhaust, the heady fragrance of frying chiles, or the slightly ammoniac smell of fresh tortillas. Much of it is homely; some of it is sublimely beautiful, and it's all jumbled together: encimado, they'd say here. On-topped. You have to adjust your vision in order to shut out different kinds of noise, to become blind to different types of visual interference, in order to find the beauty. It takes practice, but when you manage it, you're richly rewarded.

It comes home with me, too, this gentleness. Greater openness to chance experiences and encounters. La entrega: a giving over. With it comes greater patience for unexpected setbacks, and renewed faith that things - all things - have a way of working themselves out. If your problem has a solution, a Mexican proverb says, why worry? And if your problem has no solution, why worry? If I'm mindful I can sustain this state of mind for a time. Three years away though...I was definitely due for a re-charge.

Retrospective

Okay, so it's been an obscenely long time since I posted here, and I'm now slinking back with my figurative tail between my legs thanks to the gentle exhortations of my new neighbor. I thought that for this first post in over a year, I'd bring things up to date by looking at my most recent (if that word even applies) posts with the perspective that a year or more provides. So here goes:

My university is small enough that word seems to have gotten out about me; either that or students are posting mad comments on ratemyprofessor.com; either that or I'm much more effectively conveying my indifference toward my students' hardships because the Lame Excuse Quotient has significantly dropped over the past six months or so.

My mojo and I are still largely estranged, although we have attempted reconciliation on a handful of frosty occasions, and we haven't given up on working things out.

Christmas Chimp passed from this life shortly after I wrote about him, and Hedgehog Version 7.0 reigns supreme over pantry and hallway. Grendl often disappears into the pantry and moans longingly for her while sticking his head out and shooting us pointed glances from under the pantry curtain (a pose which gives him a striking resemblance to Obi-Wan Kenobi).

I confirmed that it was indeed Rachael "Raykle" Ray who stole my stuffing recipe. Either that, or some time over the course of the last year or so I convinced myself that I confirmed this. I am indifferent to which of these things is true.

I still love Julie Andrews, Halloween, and my #1 pop song versions.

Grendl's dog park behavior became too humpalicious, alienating other dog park goers and supplanting his enjoyment of things like Running Around and Doing His Business, so we don't go there as often as we once did.

I have not found a satisfactory alternative to: Kleinstuck, Asylum woods, Martini's antipasto salad, Bluegrass Breakfast, the Heritage Company, Bank Street Market, my twenties.

As predicted by gretchencb, I have found a satisfactory alternative to: the Vine neighborhood, the Corner Bar.

As predicted by madamechuchita, I have not needed to find a satisfactory alternative to: Bell's Two-Hearted Ale. I have also attempted mastery of some of Just Good Food's recipes, to varying degrees of success.

I have found a whole new list of reasons to miss the 10th floor of Sprau Tower, as well as all its other floors, most of which have to do with my gratitude to the professors who didn't just provide me with an education, but also with some much-needed fetchin' up.

Also: the gentleman heretofore known as "the neighbs" is now, officially, "the hubs". And we're still dancing.

And Canada is still a magical place where sun shines out of everyone's ass; the perfect place, in fact, if not for the weather. Which is terrible for, like, half the year.