Thoughts from Rose Avenue

Form-Fitting

I recently was filling out a screening form for a Google research study, answering questions such as how much I trust tech companies to protect my data (not much), and how much I worry about that lack of protection (also not much). In the section where they ask for demographic data, I checked off my age (alarmingly, everybody over 55 is assigned to a single age category, which I suppose is known within Google as “going to die soon”) and my household income (which probably isn’t enough to interest marketers, given that our household consists of two retired people and an unemployed 26-year-old).

When I got to the question about gender, I checked off “male,” as I always have, despite the fact that there are now multiple options such as “non-binary” and “prefer to self-describe.” This had always seemed like a routine question, but this time, it suddenly occurred to me: Why do they want to know that?

As we’ve all come to learn in the 21^st century, sex and gender are more complicated than many of us had previously accepted. What if, instead of routinely selecting “male,” I’d chosen “prefer to self-describe”? I’d probably have to write a whole essay in the blank line that followed that option.

I remember the first time I was called a man. I was probably in my late teens. I was knocking on someone’s screen door, and a young child peering through the screen called out, “Mommy, there’s a man at the door!” I was so jarred by that description that I almost turned around to see whether anyone was standing behind me. Despite the fact that Jewish tradition had declared me to be a man at age thirteen, I’d never really adopted that identity. I still haven’t — being called “a man” still feels strange to me. I’ve always thought of myself as a person who happens to be of the male gender.

I’m attracted to women, but that attraction has always felt more like-to-like than opposite-to-opposite. As a child, I would have loved to hang out with girls — they were smarter, more feeling-oriented, and less physically aggressive — but that wouldn’t have been acceptable (particularly to the girls). I’m still much more comfortable in the company of women than of men. A gay woman friend of mine once gave me a sticker that said “Honorary Lesbian,” and oddly enough, I truly felt honored.

At the same time, in a society that until recently assumed everyone to be either male or female, I’ve never had any trouble being male. I’m perfectly comfortable using men’s bathrooms, wearing men’s clothing, and checking “male” on questionnaires. I have a man’s body, complete with a beard, male pattern baldness, and male genitalia. That’s always felt perfectly natural to me.

So I’m confused and intrigued by the now-mainstream idea that people can be non-binary. After all, we’re all non-binary to some extent. I once took an online test that purported to tell you to what degree you’re masculine and to what degree you’re feminine. I came out half-and-half, which seems about right, but I doubt that there are many people who would come out 100% on either side. Yet most people, like me, don’t feel the need to declare themselves non-binary and ask to be called “they.”

The difference, so far as I can tell, is in the level of comfort with and acceptance of one’s assigned gender. I’m still uneasy with being called a man, but I have no trouble with maintaining that role in society. The non-binary and trans people that I’ve talked to do have trouble — they don’t just have mild uneasiness with their assigned gender role; they have painful, deep-in-the-soul discomfort: This isn’t me. I don’t know where that acute discomfort comes from, and why they have it and I don’t, but I can certainly accept that difference without having to understand it. So, I guess I would have had to write all this in the little space on the Google form next to “prefer to self-describe.” That brings me back to my original question, though: Why do they need to know my gender? I suppose it’s because marketing is statistics-driven, and that there’s some discernible pattern by which self-identified males prefer one thing and self-identified females prefer something else. They don’t need to hear about what’s going on in my mind and body; they just want to know where I fit into the pattern. In which case I say: Google, you’re not worth the trouble. I’ll just check “male.”

Posted March 25, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Body

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A Passing Thought

Grandma Jeanne, my mother’s mother, was a strong woman. She inherited the title of family matriarch when her own mother died in 1975, and held onto that position for more than 25 years. Well into her late 80s, she was still doing her own grocery shopping and participating weekly in a bowling league. She prided herself on her youthful appearance and manner. (When my family threw her a big 85^th birthday party, we were surprised that Joe, the man she was dating at the time, wasn’t there. When we asked why, she said, “I didn’t invite him. He thinks I’m 60!”)

She was one of seven siblings, every one of whom had as strong a personality as Grandma. In the end, only three of them remained — Grandma and her two younger sisters — and none of them was speaking to the others. She and my mother had a difficult relationship as well, but when Grandma, at age 90, decided to abandon treatment for colon cancer and go home to die, it was my mother who cared for her.

At that time, Grandma lived alone in an apartment in Fort Lauderdale. My mom lived with her second husband, Eddy, in a house in Boynton Beach. (It was an unwritten rule in that era that when Jewish New Yorkers retired, they would move to South Florida.) It took an hour each way for my mom to drive to and from Grandma’s place, but she did it just about every day. A Jamaican home health aide — whose name, alas, I don’t remember — stayed with Grandma the rest of the time.

When I heard that Grandma was on her deathbed, I flew from California to Florida to support my mother. By the time I got there, Grandma had lapsed into unconsciousness, so there wasn’t much I could do to support Grandma. When I got my first glimpse of her, she was propped up in a hospital-style bed, bald except for a few wisps of gray hair, with her mouth hanging open as she noisily struggled to breathe. She would not have liked me to see her that way.

The home health aide said, “You can talk to her. She’ll hear what you’re saying.” But as someone who barely knows what to say in ordinary situations, I certainly didn’t know what to say in this one. I put my hands on Grandma and meditated, hoping that I could pass on some healing energy to reduce her pain.

Now, this is the part that I can’t account for: My mother had to go out for some reason, and I really don’t remember why. But she did, leaving me alone with Grandma and the health aide. I sat at Grandma’s side, hoping that she’d hold on awhile longer. Every once in a while, she’d let out a moan, and I’d look helplessly at the health aide. The aide would get up from her chair across the room, feel Grandma’s feet, say, “No, it’s not time yet,” and go back to her reading.

But eventually, the inevitable happened. Grandma made a noise different from the ones before. The health aide got up, looked at her, felt her feet, and said, “OK, now it’s time.” She lifted the blanket and sheet off of Grandma and snapped the sheet in the air, the way one does when one is making a bed. Grandma let out one more sound — sort of a cross between a fearful groan and a wistful sigh — and then, in an instant, became still.

I had never seen anyone die before.

The health aide, having finished her work, packed up and left. Now it was just Grandma and me. The stillness was intense. I stared at Grandma’s body, still in the same position it was in when she let out that final groan. I tried to connect this shell with the Grandma I had cuddled with as a child, whose cooking I had always loved, whose sharp comments had alternately made me laugh and cringe. I left the room to get some air, came back a few minutes later, and found the scene absolutely unchanged, seemingly down to the last molecule. There was something magical about it, as if real life had suddenly transmuted into an exhibit in a wax museum.

Eventually my mother came back. She made some calls. Two men came in, wrapped Grandma in a blanket, strapped her to a board, and awkwardly tried to maneuver her through the small apartment and down the stairs. That magical, frozen stillness vanished, replaced by a vast emptiness. This was no longer Grandma’s apartment. It was just… an apartment.

Death is something we often hear about but rarely see. Other members of my family have died, but I was not at their side at the time. I am grateful that I had that opportunity with Grandma. From that day on, death was no longer something huge, abstract, and fearsome. It was just a physical thing that happens. The home health aide, whose reassuring presence I’ll always remember, knew this. “It’s not time yet…. OK, now it’s time.” It was really just that simple.

As I write this, nearly three million people have died of COVID-19 worldwide. Like Grandma, each one of them left a huge emptiness behind. But because of quarantine requirements, most of them had no family member by their side — someone who could have learned and benefited from witnessing their passing. That makes their deaths feel doubly sad.

Posted March 16, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Family, Society

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Crossing a Line

I recently learned a photo-retouching technique called “frequency separation.” It ingeniously reduces the time needed to do complex cleanup work on a photo from hours to minutes. Seeing it was a revelation. There suddenly appeared a dividing line in my mind: Here is how I used to work in Photoshop, and here is how I will work in Photoshop for the rest of my life.

I imagine that we all have those moments when the dividing line appears. Sometimes they’re major events, but often they’re just little ones. I remember the night in the shower when I discovered that the remaining sliver of an almost-used-up bar of soap could be “welded” to a new bar of soap, eliminating the awkwardness of having to use the flimsy remnant. I remember the day in the kitchen when I found that I could make a lasagna with noodles that hadn’t been precooked, and it would turn out just fine.

Although those two discoveries happened on my own, much of the time these life-changing moments involve other people. The one I remember best happened about 40 years ago, during a particularly frigid winter in New Jersey. I was telling someone — she could hardly be called a friend; she was more of a casual acquaintance — that I didn’t go outside unless I had to, because I found the intense cold so uncomfortable. “I used to feel that way too!” she said. “But then I got a down coat, and the cold didn’t bother me so much.”

I’d obviously heard of down coats, but it had never occurred to me to buy one. Nobody wore down In the time and place where I grew up, so its existence just wasn’t on my radar. But on this young woman’s advice, I bought a down coat — and sure enough, going out in the cold wasn’t torture anymore.

This may seem like a minor thing, but at the time, it brought about an unexpected epiphany: People affect each other’s lives.

Until then, I’d always imagined the world to resemble the illustration at the top of this post: People’s lives proceed in basically parallel lines. Sometimes the lines move closer together, sometimes they cross, and sometimes they uncross again. But I’d never really considered that when the lines cross, that crossing might alter the lines. As a result of my encountering another person, my life can change in some way. The line takes on a different hue.

For me, those encounters have most often happened at parties. There was the party in college where I casually mentioned that I had experience as a mime, and a couple of students who ran a campus theater offered me the chance to do a show. That led to the founding of the Princeton Mime Company, which lasted for another twenty years.

There was the party for faculty members of an electronic arts school, where a guy mentioned that a publisher was looking for someone who could write about Macromedia Director. That was the start of my lucrative stint as an author of computer books.

Then there was the wrap party after the taping of a public-access TV show, where I met a charming young woman who had just moved into town. I offered to show her around. Her name was Debra, and I ended up marrying her.

Not all of the line crossings are that momentous. During a visit to a friend’s house, Debra and I saw our friend pick up a banana and eat it upside-down, with the stem end in her hand. When we commented on it, she said, “That’s the way monkeys eat them. They’re easier to open and hold that way.” We tried it, and she was right. Since that day, we’ve both eaten our bananas upside-down.

Probably the most amazing of these life-altering line crossings are the ones where nothing really happens at all. You have a passing encounter with a stranger, and your eyes meet for some reason, and you remember that moment for the rest of your life.

Or perhaps your eyes don’t have to meet at all. In the movie Citizen Kane, the elderly ex-newspaperman Bernstein reminisces during an interview:

One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.

Even at the most depressed times in my life, the thing that always kept me going is the joy of unpredictability. You never know whose line is going to cross yours, and perhaps change it forever.

Posted March 10, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Perception

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Think (3)

(part three of three)

Most of what I need to know in life was taught to me in elementary school. I learned the general outlines of American and world history; I learned the basic facts and principles of biology and physics; I learned enough math to make whatever calculations were likely to be required in my day-to-day life. I learned how to think critically, write clearly, and use the resources of a library. All in all, what I’d learned by the time I reached adolescence seemed perfectly adequate to prepare me for adulthood. The only useful knowledge that high school added was learning how to type and how to drive.

When I started out at Princeton, it was with the assumption that I’d develop an affinity for something, and I trusted that at some point I would know what that “something” was. In the meantime, I nibbled from a buffet of introductory courses, hoping to be exposed to a maximum of new perspectives with a minimum of frustration.

Over the years, I saw the students around me get swept up by one intellectual passion or another. When I took Architecture 101, I found the course to be trivial and pointless. My friend Sarah, who took the very same course from the same professor, found it so inspiring that she decided to pursue architecture as her life’s work. My roommate Krishna, who took introductory Latin and ignominiously failed the course, fought to be allowed to take the same course again, because he really wanted to learn Latin. A biology major named Jenny planned to spend the summer doing field work in Peru, not because she was required to, but because she was particularly interested in learning about a particular species.

I waited in vain for my own inspiration to appear. Though I enviously watched the bolt of lightning strike everyone around me, it always managed to pass me by. It’s not that I lacked passion, but the real questions that concerned me were those that scholarship seemed ill equipped to pursue: Why do I exist on this planet, and what is the meaning and purpose of my life?

All Princeton had to offer in response to such questions was to tell me what people thought. Johann Sebastian Bach thought that the role of music was to glorify God. Thomas Jefferson thought that architecture ought to uplift the citizenry and inspire civic virtue. Bertolt Brecht thought that drama ought to keep audiences at an emotional distance so they could make rational judgments about the morality of the characters’ actions. The library was filled with famous people’s thoughts. But were they right? If they weren’t, who cares what these people thought?

I ended up majoring in philosophy, not because I seriously held out hope of finding definitive answers to life’s mysteries, but because philosophy at least addressed those questions straightforwardly. Unlike writers and artists, philosophers were not permitted to make things up, or to spout mere ideas and impressions; they had to justify their assertions by means of logical argument. Plus — in a tradition that began as far back as Socrates — prior learning, and the assumptions that came with it, were considered by philosophers to be a liability rather than an asset. When people asked my why I’d chosen to study philosophy, I said — sincerely — that it was because philosophy is the only field where I wouldn’t have to claim to know anything.

It quickly became clear, as I’d suspected, that there was no universal truth to be found in the philosophy department. Basically, what philosophers do (and therefore, what philosophy students do) is write papers. A philosophy paper — or journal article, or book — consists of the following elements, though not always in the same order:

Summarize an argument that another philosopher has made
Point out flaws in the argument
Propose a variation on that argument, or a different argument altogether, that eliminates those flaws
Point out possible objections to the newly proposed argument
Explain why those objections are wrong

Since no philosophical argument is ever perfect, this cycle can go on continuously — and it has. So far as I know, in more than two thousand years of Western philosophy, no undisputed fact has ever been established. Philosophers are still debating arguments made by Plato in ancient Greece.

I got through Princeton, as I’d gotten through all my previous years of school, by my ability to write convincingly. Writing philosophy papers — not to mention a senior thesis — probably even improved my writing, since it trained me to be precise when I might otherwise be tempted to fudge. (Later in life, when I tried my hand at writing marketing materials, clients criticized my work for being “too clear.”) But I can’t truthfully say that studying philosophy taught me anything useful about the world.

I still value my college experience, and I’m sure my Princeton degree has opened doors for me. But I can’t say confidently that I earned that degree, or that my spot at the school might not have been made better use of by someone else. I still don’t have any answers to life’s big questions, and I’m still not convinced that institutions of higher learning are the place to find them. Perhaps the world is meant to be experienced rather than analyzed. Speaking for myself, I still get as much pleasure from a glass of good whiskey as I do from a good book.

Posted March 2, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Education, Philosophy

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Think (2)

(part two of three)

I have a brother-in-law who has always surrounded himself with books. For him, the life of the mind is the only life worth living. During family visits, I would occasionally join in late-night philosophical and political discussions with him and his grown children, and they appreciated having my voice in the mix. But one night, I made the mistake of admitting that I got as much pleasure out of a glass of good whiskey as I did out of a good book. At that moment, I fell so far in my brother-in-law’s estimation that I could practically feel the temperature drop.

I was not surprised. Years before, I’d had a similar experience as a student at Princeton. Under a tree on a warm spring day, I fell into a discussion with a graduate teaching assistant who had found my work competent but completely lacking in inspiration. He asked me what I wanted to get out of life, and I replied that I just wanted to find happiness.

“Happiness!?” he said, nearly spitting out his cigar. “Where do you expect to find it, under a rock? Happiness comes from engaging deeply with something. Don’t you have any intellectual curiosity?”

Well, of course I had curiosity, but it had always driven me to find out a little bit about everything, without necessarily caring about the details. I wanted to enjoy my life. I wasn’t convinced that the road to fulfillment involved knowing more things.

“Then why are you at Princeton, of all places?” the TA asked.

It was a very good question. I’d always done well in school, but it had never been for love of the subject matter. As someone who was physically awkward and socially inept, I’d always found that being a good student was my only available route to acceptance.

Getting high grades had won me the grudging respect of my peers, supportive attention from my teachers, and expressions of love from my parents. And fortunately — through the early years of high school, at least — academic achievement came easily to me. I rarely took notes or studied for a test. Even if I didn’t understand something, my writing skills were good enough that I was able to sound like I understood it.

But when I got to my senior year in high school, the difficulty level of the coursework finally caught up to my ability, and I found myself having to struggle just like “ordinary” students. It wasn’t a motivational experience. There was nothing I wanted to know badly enough that I was willing to work at it.

Fortunately, by then I’d already accumulated a scholastic record that was good enough to get me into a top-tier college. I applied to Princeton because my parents insisted that I try for at least one Ivy League school, but I had no intention of going there. I was sure the students would be cold and stuck-up, and it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to fake my way through the coursework. I procrastinated shamelessly on the application and neglected to apply for the optional in-person interview. I subconsciously hoped that if I ignored Princeton, it would go away.

Despite my best efforts, the Princeton admissions office chose to accept me. At that point, my parents began an all-out campaign to protect me from my own sluggardliness. Their son had an opportunity to attend one of the top schools in the country — an opportunity they’d never had — and they’d be damned if they were going to let me blow it. When I showed no inclination to visit the Princeton campus, my mother dragged me to the Port Authority in New York and deposited me on a bus to central New Jersey.

Spring that year had been cold and rainy, and I’d viewed a number of other schools through a chilly, gray mist. But the day I visited Princeton, the sun shone brightly, and a warm breeze stirred the magnolia blossoms. The campus seemed like a mythic kingdom. I instantly fell in love with its Gothic architecture, its green courtyards, and its wooded sanctuaries. I chatted with a number of students who seemed warm, genuine, and astonishingly normal. I took a campus tour, and when we walked into Nassau Hall — the school’s oldest building, which had once housed the entire college — I felt my feet mold themselves to the rutted stone steps that had been worn down by generations of students walking on them. Suddenly, every other school I’d seen seemed temporary and insubstantial. I knew then that I needed to be part of that venerable chain of Princetonians.

My love for the history and physical beauty of the university never abated. Eventually, as a Princeton student, I trained to be a campus tour guide, and later became president of the student-run tour service. But my association with Princeton felt hollow without my engaging in the intellectual tradition was the main reason for the school’s existence. I was a student, but it was clear I’d never be a scholar.

(To be continued in part 3)

Posted February 23, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Education

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Form-Fitting

A Passing Thought

Crossing a Line

Think (3)

Think (2)

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