Society

Mouse

I’m not very good at catching things. My hand-eye coordination isn’t great in general, but catching is a special case — because if a solid object is hurtling toward the upper half of one’s body, the natural impulse is to get out of the way. This is an impulse that we are supposed to learn to overcome in childhood, but I never did. The best I was able to do is engage in a halfhearted performance of looking like I was trying to catch the thing while still getting out of the way.

Despite this handicap, I still manage to live among civilized people, because catching things isn’t an essential part of everyday life. But there are far riskier things that we must learn to do because one can’t lead a full life without them. Probably the best example is driving. I can get in a car and drive at high speeds on a freeway, closely surrounded by other cars, without giving it a second thought. On those rare occasions where I do give it a second thought — when I’m behind the wheel on an interstate, casually listening to a podcast while tearing along at 80 miles per hour, and suddenly think, “Ohmigod, what am I doing? Am I crazy?” — there’s no immediate equivalent to getting out of the way.

Think of how we routinely invite foods and medicines directly into our bodies without having any idea where they came from, or trust our safety to the strangers who repair our cars and build our bridges, or get into a shower with a bar of slippery soap. We don’t even think of these things as being dangerous, because to do so would essentially stop us from living our lives. There are, in fact, some people who refuse to do commonplace things on account of the real risks involved, but we tend to consider them deluded instead of recognizing that they’re being rational, and we’re the ones who are deluded.

It’s become commonly accepted wisdom that the key to success in life is facing and overcoming our fears. This doctrine overlooks the fact that fear exists for a reason: to keep us safe. The important thing is to differentiate between the fears that are irrational — fear of spiders, for example — and fears that are well-founded, such as fear of investing our life savings in a questionable business venture.

For some people, overcoming fear is an end in itself. They’ll decide to try skydiving, not because they think plunging thousands of feet toward earth will be a pleasant experience, but because they want to prove to themselves that they can do it. I can’t call such people unreasonable — statistically, deaths from skydiving are rare — but I’d think they’d want to reserve those fear-overcoming impulses for times where they can accomplish something more practical.

I once went ziplining over a Santa Cruz redwood grove, mostly because I was with a group of people who all wanted to do it. The prospect of doing it was frightening, but I realized that my fear was irrational, since people go ziplining all of the time without plummeting to their deaths. So I swooped over the redwoods, and survived. I guess that counts as proving to myself that I could do it, but I’m not sure how that’s valuable. I certainly wouldn’t do it again, because the one thing I remember about the experience is that it was scary. And unlike people who flock to horror movies and roller coasters, I don’t find being terrified to be enjoyable.

There have been times in my life when I’ve deliberately faced my fears, but those were times when I had something to gain by doing so. My first job after college was with an educational publishing company, where I rose quickly from production assistant to the person essentially in charge of audiovisual production. It was secure employment, doing something that I was good at, and I got regular paychecks and benefits. But after six years or so, I began to feel that I’d learned everything I could learn there, and so I decided to quit my job and become a freelancer. It was probably the most frightening decision I’ve ever made, since I had no safety net other than a small savings account, but it was something I knew I needed to do. The fear was intense but irrelevant.

Sometimes, there’s no choice but to face your fear. I vividly remember being stranded when I was twelve years old. I was on a teen study tour of France — a prize I’d won in a French contest — where I was known as Mouse, since I was the youngest one in the group. After five weeks in France, we spent a week in England, living in a dormitory in Reading and commuting by train to London. The first day, at the Reading train station, I somehow got separated from the others, who (unknowingly) boarded the train to London without me. So what do you do when you’re a mouse who’s alone in a foreign country? What I did was take the next train to London, spend a day sightseeing on my own — I remember going to Madame Tussaud’s and later shopping for souvenirs — and take the train back to Reading. I then hitchhiked from the train station back to our dorm. I’m not sure anyone ever realized I was gone.

Was it frightening? Definitely — especially the hitchhiking part. Would I do it again? Who knows, since I’m quite unlikely ever to be in the same predicament. But it’s good to know that when circumstances require, I can get past my fear and do what needs to be done.

Posted April 16, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Society

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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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Yay Team

When I was seven years old, my father took me to my first baseball game. He had no particular interest in baseball, and neither did I, but he’d been led to believe that fathers ought to take their sons to baseball games. So we took the train and the subway into Queens, to the recently erected Shea Stadium, to watch the Mets play the Phillies.

At that time, the Mets were a fairly new team and the laughingstock of the National League. I watched batter after batter strike out; I watched outfielders repeatedly fumble the ball and infielders miss it entirely. The Phillies, by contrast, were the picture of competence: They tended to hit fairly regularly, make it to base now and then, and field the ball as if they had at least played the game before.

My father seemed not to notice the difference. Whenever a Met was at bat, he would applaud encouragingly; whenever a Met managed to hit the ball or catch it, he cheered along with the crowd. Whenever a Phillie did anything similar, he sat in silence. This irritated me no end.

“Why are you cheering for the Mets,” I asked him, “when the Phillies are obviously the better team?”

“The Mets are from New York,” he explained. “They represent us — they’re our home team. So we root for them.”

My seven-year-old brain found this concept difficult to grasp. Just because the Mets were from New York, how exactly did they represent us? I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think New York was a better place if the Mets won a game, or a worse place if the Mets lost a game. Either way, New York and its residents would remain exactly the same.

Even if the Mets did somehow represent us, they were clearly a terrible team. So why did my father want this terrible team to win the game? It seemed to me that anyone who cared about baseball would want the better team to win. Otherwise, the game would have no meaning. If winning were purely a matter of dumb luck, such that even the Mets could do it, there would be no reason to feel proud of winning. You might just as well feel proud of winning a coin toss.

I’m many years older now, and I’m happy to say that I’ve figured out many of life’s puzzles, but this is one I still don’t get. I live in Oakland, and so I’m supposed to be happy when the Oakland A’s win — in fact, I’m supposed to actively want them to win — and yet I still don’t see how my identity, or my city’s worth, is at all tied to the performance of a baseball team.

I’m not saying this to be dismissive. Good friends, for whom I have great respect, have emotional investments in the outcomes of baseball, football, and basketball games, and so I certainly can’t claim that there’s anything superior about my not having such an investment. I’m just trying to understand it.

I can imagine that many years ago, in the days of wooden bleachers and hand-operated scoreboards, your home team really was your home team. You might have known some of the players, or their families; you might feel a kinship with them because they came from your neighborhood. The part of you that wanted to be an athlete might be living vicariously through their wins and losses. I could see how under those circumstances, a victory by your team might make you feel better about yourself.

But these days, professional sports is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that draws on a worldwide pool of talent. In most cases, there is no underlying relationship between the players, the management, and your home town. The city where they play is, in every practical way, arbitrary. So how is it that people feel an emotional tie to their city’s team? When I ask friends why, they can’t offer any logical explanation; like my father, they just do.

It strikes me that this is similar to the idea of loving one’s country. As an American, I’m supposed to love America. I long wondered why this was so. I can be grateful that I had the luck to be born in this country; I can be proud of anything I’ve done to make this country a better place. But “love” seems like an odd thing to demand, considering that if I’d been born in France, I’d be expected to love France, and if I’d been born in Papua New Guinea, I’d be expected to love Papua New Guinea.

What I realized is that loving one’s country isn’t something one chooses to do; for most people it’s inborn, like loving one’s family. If I love my mother, it’s not because I think she’s better than other people’s mothers, or because she’s done something particular to make her worthy of love; it’s just because she’s my mother. There’s no actual requirement to love one’s mother, but if I met someone who claimed not to, I’d probably be wary of that person. (I’m not including here people who, as a result of childhood neglect or abuse, have a compelling reason to renounce that emotional tie.) Under normal circumstances, loving your mother is something you just do.

So I’m guessing that having an emotional attachment to a country or a team is something similarly inborn, something that grew out of loyalty to a clan or tribe. If I lack that sort of attachment, I can’t just choose to have it, but I’ll understand if that makes you trust me a little less.

Posted February 2, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Society

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Goal Post

“What’s a new year’s resolution?” I asked my mother. I’m not sure how old I was, but evidently I’d heard the subject mentioned on TV.

“It’s a promise that you make to behave differently in the new year,” she said. “To do something that’s good for you, even if it’s hard to do.”

“Do you have to make a new year’s resolution?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Then why would anybody do it?” was my quite reasonable response.

I have to admit that I still don’t understand the idea of new year’s resolutions. If there’s something I’m convinced that I must do, I don’t resolve to do it; I just do it. If I’m not psychologically prepared or sufficiently motivated to do it, resolving isn’t going to help. (I get that most people’s resolutions are about behaviors — like eating better or getting more exercise — that are ongoing rather than one-time-only, but even then, they still have to wake up each day and newly find the motivation to do the thing.)

Perhaps my failure to grasp the concept of resolutions has something to do with my general approach to life: I’ve never been one to set goals. In fact, I’m not even clear on where goals are supposed to come from. If I’m not satisfied with my current circumstances, I look for some opportunity to change them. It’s a trial-and-error process — some things work out; some don’t. No matter what I do, I end up learning something, and whatever I’ve learned allows me to try something else. Eventually, as a result of these incremental changes, I end up in a place that’s better than where I started. But there’s no way that I’d have been able to predict where I am today and set that as a goal.

That’s one reason why I’m self-taught in just about everything I do. Unlike most of my peers, I never went to graduate school. What would I study? Without a vision of what my future life will look like, I had no idea what I’d need to learn.

This attitude presented some problems when I became a community-college faculty member. I was expected to help my students get on a career pathway, which I was entirely unqualified to do. I was also expected to insist that my students learn whatever I was teaching them, that they stay in my course even if they want to drop out, and that they finish college. I didn’t feel like I had grounds to insist on any of those things, since I don’t know what’s best for any given student. If a student doesn’t come to class, how can I possibly judge whether what they did instead was more important? If they don’t complete some of the lessons, perhaps they’re not interested in learning about those particular topics — and if so, why should that not be OK? How do I know that college is even the right thing for any particular student?

Then there was the administrative side. As head of the Digital Media program, I needed to engage in an annual process called Program Review, in which I had to account for my department’s performance over the past year and state my needs for the coming year. The college used this information to decide how resources would be allocated. Since I was a one-person department, this should have been pretty straightforward, but I’m not skilled in the kind of thinking that this exercise required.

One of the sections of the Program Review form (which was as long as a federal income tax form and about as pleasant to complete) required me to list my department’s goals, lay out a timeline of steps toward those goals, and state the criteria by which progress could be measured. This section always flummoxed me. I was a teacher, so what kind of goals was I supposed to have? The only thing I could think to put on the form was, “To teach each lesson a little better than I did the previous time.” For the timeline, I put “Every day.”

Of course I had bigger ideas for what could be done in the future, but I could hardly call them goals. In the section in which we requested resources, I’d say things like “If you’re willing to buy more powerful computers and expensive software, we could teach 3D animation” or “If you allow me to hire additional faculty members, we could teach things I don’t know about, like game design.” Then it was up to the college administrators to decide whether they thought those things were important. It made no difference to me; I was content to go on doing what I was doing.

I’ve heard many times that one of the keys to happiness is setting life goals. I’ve never understood why. As far as I can tell, there are people who set goals and reach them, and therefore are happy. There are people who set goals and don’t reach them — they’re not happy. That doesn’t seem any different from people who don’t set goals and are happy, or people who don’t and are unhappy.

For almost everyone, getting anywhere in life requires taking risks. By staking everything on a desired outcome, goal-setters take one big risk. Incrementalists like me take a series of little risks. Both seem like equally good approaches to me.

Posted December 30, 2020 by Mark S
Category: Society

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Since You Asked

Sometime in the 1980s, before the internet was in common use, a friend came to me with an odd request. “I’m doing a ten-mile walk for charity,” she said. (I don’t remember what the charity was.) “And I’d like you to sponsor me.”

“Sponsor you? I don’t get it,” I said. “Where are you walking to?

“We’re not walking to anywhere,” she said. “It’s just to raise money. Like, if you pledge two dollars per mile, and I walk the whole ten miles, then you donate twenty dollars.”

“And if you only walk five miles, then I only donate ten dollars?”

“That’s right, she said. “But I’m planning to walk the whole ten miles.”

This made no sense. “If you’re asking me to donate money to this charity, that’s fine. But what does your walking have to do with it? Why does the worthiness of the charity to receive my money depend on how far you walk?”

“That’s just how it works,” she said.

“But I could just donate twenty dollars, because you asked me to,” I said, “and then you wouldn’t have to walk at all.”

“Twenty dollars is fine,” she said. “I’ll put you down for two dollars a mile.”

So she got what she wanted, but I felt like no actual communication had taken place. I still saw no inherent connection between the money and the walking.

I wish I had a more satisfying ending to this story, but I don’t. Nowadays, I see plenty of requests from people who are walking (or running, or biking, or swimming) for charity. And the weird thing is that nobody seems to see anything strange about it! Everyone just accepts that a person’s engaging in an unproductive physical activity is a rational reason to donate money. When I donate, it’s because the charity is worthwhile and a good friend asked me to; I don’t care what my friend does for exercise.

But I’ll tell you what I won’t do — I won’t vote for someone just because they ask me to. The situation is usually like this: A friend will email me (usually as one of many “undisclosed recipients”) with a message like, “I entered Floofy in the World’s Cutest Dog contest, and if he gets the most votes, I win a lifetime supply of pet food. So please vote for Floofy as the cutest dog, and tell your friends to vote for him too!”

Originally, I used to take these requests seriously. I would have to reply, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to look at the pictures of all of the dogs, so I have no way to confirm that Floofy is really the cutest.” And they would respond, “What do you mean? I’m just asking you to vote for him. I’m your friend — don’t you want me to win the pet food?”

The thing is, if everybody votes for a particular candidate because someone asked them to, then the adorable dog photos that everyone uploaded serve no purpose at all. The winner of the contest is not going to be the cutest dog; it’s going to be the dog whose owner has the most friends. That makes the whole thing a lie. Why not just call it a popularity contest? I just ignore those kinds of requests.

Unfortunately, the contest entrant’s way of thinking also pops up in more significant situations. When I was a faculty member at Chabot College, in my roles both as a department head and a committee chair, I was often in the position of having to request things from the administration. Naturally, the equipment or staffing that I was asking for cost money, and there were other people whose roles required them to compete for the same pot of money. I would fill out the appropriate forms, in which I would make a compelling argument for why my request was necessary, but I almost never got what I was asking for.

“Of course not!” my colleagues would say. “You can’t just go through official channels. You have to advocate! You have to get in their face! You have to convince them that what you need is more important that what other people need!”

But there’s no way I could do that, because in truth, I had no idea whether my needs were more important than others’. The only people who had the information necessary to prioritize the various requests were the administrators to whom the requests were made. That’s why we had to fill out forms — so that the administrators could do their job, which was to analyze the competing claims and make justifiable decisions. If their conclusion was that other departments’ needs were more urgent than mine, I had to respect that determination.

I don’t want to live in a world where the resources go to the person who yells the loudest, or the dog food goes to the person with the most connections. For that reason, I have to trust that other people don’t, either.

Posted November 12, 2020 by Mark S
Category: Society

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Mouse

A Passing Thought

Yay Team

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Since You Asked

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