What draws a powerful man to pay for a women outside of
marriage? It’s not the sex. In fact, sex is the beard, if
you know what I mean. By paying money for the excuse of
sex, they don’t have to say: I am lonely. I am fearful. I
am growing older. I am not loved. My wife is bored with
me. I can’t talk to my children. I’m worried about my
job, which means nothing to me. Above all, they are
saying: Pretend you like me.
The film was written by
Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Believe it or not, the
same two wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s
Thirteen.” I imagine the three of them sitting around
on the “Ocean’s” set and asking, “What could we be doing
instead of this?”
Chelsea is played by Sasha Grey. She is 21. Since 2006,
according to IMDb, she’s made 161 porn films, of which
only the first title can be quoted here: “Sasha Grey
Superslut.” No, here’s another, which makes me smile: “My
First Porn #7.” I haven’t seen any of them, but now I
would like to see one, watching very carefully, to see if
she suggests more than one level.
To give us a sense of treating actual patients in our preclinical prosthodontics course, we are asked to give our cases names and stories. I borrow from real life. So, my first patient’s name last semester was Chris Rupert. He needed crowns on #30, #8, and #12 due to a baseball brawl. I’m waiting back on the lab for a full gold crown on #30, a porcelain fused to metal on #12, and a full porcelain for #8. I’ve got a bunch of casts labelled “CR.”
My current patient is named Vanessa Rupert — the baseball team (aka family) she started with Chris Rupert got a bit rowdy and a stray pitch knocked #8 & #7 clear out of her mouth (i.e. “avulsed”). After practicing bridge abutment preparations, we will soon be ready to begin preparing a bridge for Vanessa’s front teeth. Soon, she’ll be happily restored to full toothy function, just like her husband.
This afternoon, we mailed out 99 cotton envelopes with wedding invitations in them. This is happening! I’ll post the design of the invitations in about a week, so I won’t ruin the surprise for everyone.
Sometimes, in the middle of the supermarket, I stop and look around at column after column of frozen food — any food I can imagine, right there for purchase. Think about that, anything I want to eat, I can. Instantly. Just hop in the heated/cooled automatic transportation machine. Sometimes, I can feel the pressure from the thousands of generations that preceded me — tens of thousands of years of suffering and hardship of our ancestors, attempting to find and grow enough food to live. And it makes me think, I’ve gotta do everything I can with this life. I have to act in such a way that honors the fact that I’ve never known hunger, that my life is unbelievably luxurious compared to 99.9% of those who came before me. I must push my potential, seize this moment, make the most of myself. And yet sometimes, I feel an unhappiness, a profound ennui. And it makes me sad, to feel that unworthy and unappreciative of this gift of ease. So, whenever I run across research about happiness, my interest is invariable piqued. In the parts of the world where the hunger problem has been solved, it has been replaced by a happiness problem — but, of course, the answer to unhappiness is much more complex than the answer to hunger.
In the June issue of The Atlantic magazine, there’s an article called What Makes Us Happy? I loaded it up a few days ago and I’ve been making my way through it… and I thought I ended up at the article from a link at kottke.org. But then I went to check at Kottke’s website, only to find that he had written up the article just a few hours before now. Oh well — if there’s someone whose tracks that I’d like to (accidentally) follow online, it’s probably Jason Kottke. Therefore, I am neither the first nor the last to recommend this article.
The premise: imagine a longitudinal study that follows a group of men over more than 70 years. Some become congressmen, one becomes president, others become doctors or content patriarchs, some drunks, others commit suicide, and still others fall deep into depression — many combine the aforementioned achievements and problems. Indeed, you needn’t imagine this study at all. There was (is) such a thing, called the Grant Study. Scientifically, the data it has yielded can help one to learn a stunning amount about many aspects of mental health — including how to live a happy, healthy life.
As was articulated recently in a New York Times article called What Are Friends For? A Longer Life — the important part of happiness, and health is… surprising. Statistically, your cholesterol is important for some of your life, and indeed, staying at a healthy weight is important too. Now, parts of the Atlantic article echo the Times: your chances of living a happy, full life into old age are vastly increased by connections to other people, e.g. volunteering, friendship. There are so many quotes I’d like to share from the article — if you intend to read it, I’d recommend stopping now and going to do so. If you haven’t the time, I’ll keep my favorite tidbits to three things:
When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a
swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis.
Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a
mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us
through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save
us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and
lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption
or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to
best, in four categories.
At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or
“psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or
megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality
tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to
anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations,
which include acting out, passive aggression,
hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as
isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede
intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal”
people. These include intellectualization (mutating the
primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought);
dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s
feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can
involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or
failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.”
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism,
humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future
discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone
attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in
good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings,
like putting aggression into sport, or lust into
courtship).
A bit on those surprising health factors I mentioned, including those adaptations from above:
What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By
the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement,
Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter
century, had identified seven major factors that predict
healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.
Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were
education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing
alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.
…
Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of
relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not
intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that
leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are
necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can
come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s
relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life
adjustment better than any other variable, except
defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially
powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age
65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In
an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant
Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned
from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the
only thing that really matters in life are your
relationships to other people.”
And finally, a wonderfully poignant anecdote about love:
In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more
vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re
future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate
payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources
at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will
yield better health and deeper connections—but in the
short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while
negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive
emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection
and heartbreak.
To illustrate his point, he told a story
about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and
well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant
said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his
wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to
many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a
letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced,
desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached.
And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered
with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later,
Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box
down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re
going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry,
“but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant
said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”
Almost a decade ago I wrote (in an AIM profile of all places) that “giving, as well as receiving, love is its definition” — but just as living “happy-well” is a challenge, so too is love. It is a beautiful challenge, no?
The wonderful thing about this article, though, is it doesn’t espouse a narrow path to happiness. There are many ways to it, suitable for many different people. Happiness is, I think, an extremely interesting problem of our time. A spiritual hunger.
More ideas on the topic, but running out of time. Signing off for the time being…
It’s the time of the year when the air begins to smell beautiful. Perhaps you’ve noticed? This is the smell that gives me spring fever like nothing else. It’s not just the freshly cut grass in the evenings; it’s millions of blossoms and leaves and moss… Incidentally, I remember learning in my undergrad microbiology class that actinobacteria are an important component of that fresh nature smell — they’re what you smell after it rains.
Wedding invitations are currently kicking my butt. We’ve gone through so many iterations of the design: damask, flower motif, outline, pen and ink, maps, initials, script, serif… and finally ended up with something not bad. Then there was printing… pantone colors, letterpress, offset, laser, inkjet. The options were too expensive, or wrong paper, or couldn’t go borderless.
We settled with a 1000dpi Photoshop file output via inkjet photo printer onto Crane 8.5x11" 100% cotton “Natural White” 300gsm cover stock. We’ll make two cuts of those sheets to generate the different cards.
Anyhow, we’re in the final printing stages now and the invitations aren’t half bad. Like Mykala said, “I just want a piece of paper that lets people know where we are getting married.” That, we have.
From my course eval of Dr. Katz’s Physiology course:
Perhaps I will have instructors who rival Dr. Katz’s wit,
knowledge, and personality, but I sincerely doubt I will
have the privilege of learning from another professor who
is capable of teaching as well as he is. Initially, I
couldn’t figure out why physiology came so easily in this
course, and then I realized it was because Dr. Katz was
teaching the material not presenting it. Normally, I spend
my days watching endless parades of powerpoint
slides — I am talked at over the slides and then expected
to regurgitate the information through rote memory. Some
of my peers have expressed a preference for this type of
classroom experience, but it drives me crazy. Actually
learning and understanding material (as I did due to Dr.
Katz’s lectures) made the topics more interesting,
relevant, and memorable. Everything Dr. Katz did, from
his jokes to his illustrations, was done with one purpose
— so his students could learn.
Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day,
commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant
that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what
the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and
the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of
the celebration.
Nevertheless, happy Mother’s Day! I’m in the middle of an absolutely splendid one here at home in Woodbury. Life. Is. Great.
Mykala choreographed a great dance to Psapp - Leaving in Coffins. I love how unique the sound of that band is. Really really fun sound. And if Mykala hasn’t won a competition award for that choreography yet, she’ll probably win one soon.