Scrappy bits

Today was quite an ordinary day.  Except that it was filled with irascible unexpected emergencies I hadn’t planned on.  

Well, I suppose “unexpected emergencies one hasn’t planned on” constitutes a double tautology, since emergencies are never planned, are they?  I mean, one doesn’t say “please book an ambulance for my heart attack about four this afternoon, will you, honey?”  of “have the fire department come at nine to put out the fire in the kitchen I’m going to start about then.”

So more precisely, my day seemed to be filled with unexpected events which displaced most of the things I’d planned.  The details do not constitute a gripping story, though they do constitute, I suspect, what a great deal of life is about. In any case, our Internet connection is restored, the heating pump is working again, the cat is out of the tree, the door keys have been retrieved from the trash can, and we bought our weekly supply of groceries early because a major snow storm is predicted to come in by Sunday.

Major snow storm, by the way, constitutes a dazzling 4 inches.  By my standards, that hardly even constitutes an excuse for not driving into work.  But it’s a big deal in this maritime climate in the southeast of England.

 So we made sure we had a bottle of sherry should we need help to keep warm.

Excruciating memories

I think we all have them – those moments when we remember something we said or did and cringe with anguish.

A Times columnist in a moment of what I would consider heroic candor shared one of these moments recently.  One night after a bitter divorce when he was seriously under the influence he called up his former mother-in-law and said that it was she he’d always fancied, and could he come over so they could talk about it.

To his immense relief the next morning, she refused.

It’s hop scotch next

Somewhere in the hazy memories of my childhood, I have a vague recollection that “hocus pocus dominocus” was somehow profane.  But it may have been only that we used the phrase as a kind of magic.

It is obvious to me now, with my smattering of high school Latin, that it was indeed profane.  It seems to have been derived by the Puritans from  ”Hoc es enim corpus meum” – “this is my body” - the words used by Roman Catholic priests to accompany the trans-substantiation of the bread and wine during Mass into the body and blood of Christ.

The Puritans thought the whole idea of trans-substantiation was heretical, a belief in magic that was wholly perpostrous.  So my childhood memories seem based on some actual information probably passed on by the nuns who taught us in grade school.

But memories run far deeper than back to my relatively recent childhood.  Catholics and their Cardinal Keither O’Brien in Scotland are objecting to the Rangers football club which has historically represented Protestants and remains a keen rival of the Celtics, a predominantly Catholic football club.  Ranger fans have been doing the Hokey Cokey, at Rangers-Celtic games, a song that the Catholics have decided is politically incorrect because it derides their beliefs.

They are calling for an investigation to determine whether it represents a “faith hate crime” under present British law.

Sticking together

Sometimes the best things in life show up in the most unexpected places:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4696315n

Predicting the damage

Several studies have come out recently on recessions during the last century.  They provide causes for concern, with just enough reason for hope to hang on.

• the 15 recessions in the last century that began with a banking crisis lasted an average of two years, but unemployment rose for a full five years, and housing did not begin to recover for six years
• the Great Depression lasted for 43 months.  Since then, the longest recession in America has been 16 months.  But the current recession has already last 12 months
• since the 1930’s, the length of recessions has been getting shorter, and the length of the growth periods has been getting longer
• it looks increasingly as if no major economy in the world in going to avoid a significant slowdown during this recession.  Some analysts are predicting that global growth next year might be perilously close to zero

Nobody believes we won’t eventually get over it.  But this recession might be pretty bad for a pretty long time before it gets better.

When we do, I don’t think we will be returned to the world as we knew it.  A lot of things are going to have changed forever.

How to get smart while brushing your teeth

An old war injury is causing Peter some significant shoulder pain, and as a result he has been brushing his teeth with his left hand.  He said it was surprisingly difficult.

I read somewhere earlier that using the non-dominant hand for tasks we usually do with our dominant hand is a good way of building new brain synapses and delaying the speed of age-related forgetfulness.  It’s marketed as a sort of exercise for the brain.

So I tried it this morning.  

All I can say is that it is a good thing I was not yet fully dressed.  I doubt my teeth were properly brushed, and I am sure that the toothpaste running from my wrist to my elbow accomplished nothing worthwhile whatsoever.

What it did for my brain synapses I’m not sure.  I think I might just forget about it.

Universal communication

My brother Larry just wrote to tell me he told his friend Claire, a bi-lingual Cuban living in the United States, the story of my fluency in Spanish.  We’d just moved to Spain, and what little Spanish I had dated back to two years in high school.  But Peter was fluent in French, so negotiating in Spanish was my job.

Which is why, when a water pipe buried under the tiles in our living room broke flooding most of the first floor, I called the Spanish plumber.  I hadn’t had time to craft my message in careful Spanish, and in my attempt to explain my urgent problem blurted out  ”Muy muy agua!”

For that small number whose Spanish may be even more rudimentary than mine at the time, the exact translation is “Very very water!”

But you know what?  The plumber knew what I meant.  I’m not sure what he thought about the American senora.  

But Claire thinks it’s one of the funniest stories she’s heard in ages.

Science Phobia Cure

The headlines on the front page of The Times here in England announced hope that paralyzed adults might regain their movement as the result of stem cell research.  Upon reading the article, I was surprised to learn that it was about the policy change already put into action by President Obama to return federal support to stem cell research.

In fact, as Obama promised, he is restoring funding for many science research projects which have been blackballed by the Bush administration.

 Bush seems to have responded for years to the significant number of people who are truly terrified of science.  They don’t want to explore the unknown or have their Right Answers questioned by difficult findings.  They know everything they need to know already, and perceive knowledge as dangerous.  Best avoided when at all possible.

I find this scary on two counts.  One was that they were powerful enough to influence the decisions of the highest office in the country on this matter.

The second, even scarier count, is that they are still out there.  Still committed to imposing their version of truth on the rest of the world – whether we agree or not.  However much history would seem to suggest this is a destructive road to go down, we keep thinking that this time, this Truth, will be different.

But for now we have Obama and his Blackberry.

Coming clean

After the euphoria of the last few days, I find myself moving back toward the middle ground.  That is, to the fairly mundane details of most of everyday life.

I was helped considerably by a friend who, having asked what I thought about Obama so far, then asked me – get ready for this – what I do with bars of soap that are too small to wash with.

I do realize this is a problem almost all of us have to face sometime in our lives.  Can you throw it away without a guilty conscience?  or do you try to squish it onto a larger bar, to which it will inevitably detach itself, probably to slither around the floor of the shower? (Why hasn’t anyone invented soap-glue to solve this difficulty?)  Do you collect bits in a dish hoping that whoever cleans the bathroom will spirit the whole lot away?  Or collect them in a jar of water with the hope that eventually the soap will dissolve so it can be used in one of the squirty liquid-soap dispensers?

These are momentous decisions not to be dismissed lightly.

Does hope make a difference?

There is a great unresolved conundrum in science, and yesterday’s inauguration and the energy it generated illustrated it.

The conundrum is what we psychologists call “the mind-body problem.”  Basically, the unsolved problem is how our conscious experiences – like the hope, joy and exuberance yesterday, or fear, confusion, hatred, puzzlement, love, or understanding – are related to the biochemistry of our brains.

Hang on, this really becomes a fascinating problem that goes right to the heart of what we are doing on this planet in this universe.  Because people who try to answer the mind-body question do so by taking one of three positions:

• In the first position, there are two worlds – one physical and one spiritual.  Plato made this position popular among the Greeks, and it was adopted by Christianity.  In this view, the conscious part of ourselves is a product of a spirit, or if you prefer, a soul.  When we die, the soul leaves the body, and so the body is no longer the medium through which the spirit operates and is manifest.   But the soul continues to live outside the physical world.
• A second position dismisses conscious experience as an epi-phenomenon.  Like a shadow, consciousness isn’t real in itself but is merely a reflection of our physical selves.  So when our bodies die, consciousness is no longer possible, and is snuffed out with death.  This is a reductionist view.
• The third position is that there is one natural world, and consciousness, which is real, is part of it.  Consciousness can and does influence what we do, and how we feel.  It is effected by our biochemistry, but in turn can also change our physical condition.  As we saw yesterday, our consciousness can be effected by events thousands, even millions, of miles away.  And that change in consciousness can change not only our feelings but our behavior.

I belong in this last category.  It still doesn’t answer the question of how mind and body are related, but it does put the problem squarely in the lap of science.

When you think about it, it’s almost the same question that asks how life and inert matter are related.  How did life emerge from non-living things?  We don’t know.

But until Einstein developed his theory of relativity, science thought that matter and energy must be two different things that shaped the universe.  Einstein showed that they were two different versions of the same thing.

I think some day some great mind may be able to unite body and mind the way Einstein united matter and energy.  In the meantime, nothing will convince me that hope and ideas and belief in what we can do can’t change the world.

Now I must return to painting the living room walls.  Somehow, despite my faith in the importance of thought and feeling,  I suspect sitting here and hoping won’t do the trick.