The Antidepressant Wars →
Like many depressed people, I resisted the idea of psychotropic medication. I was deeply hurt when my psychotherapist suggested I see a psychiatrist about antidepressant drugs. How could she think I was that crazy or that weak? But she said she was concerned for my survival, and I eventually did as she asked. I became an outpatient at a venerable psychiatric hospital, where I found a kind stranger who knew my deepest secrets and wanted to end my suffering. He wrote a prescription, and thus began my 30-year trek.
Depression is sometimes confused with sadness. Many depressed people are very sad, as I was, but the essence of my depression was feeling dead among the living. Everything was just so hard. William Styron describes depression as “a storm of murk.” Andrew Solomon’s atlas of depression is titled Noonday Demon. I too found depression to be fierce, wrapping me in a heavy woolen blanket and mocking my attempts to cast it off. The self-loathing was palpable; it felt like I was chewing glass. I sensed that other people were seeing things I did not, and apparently they were, because when I began my first course of antidepressants, it was as if someone had turned on the lights. It did not make me happy or even content. The world simply looked different—brighter, deeper—and I was a part of it. I saw something other than the impassable flatness and enervating dullness, and I was amazed.
My progress came at a cost. In the late 1970s, before Prozac, antidepressant medication was seldom spoken of. The people I told about my treatment echoed my first reaction and sang throaty choruses of why-don’t-you-just-cheer-up and won’t-this-make-you-a-drug-addict. I was also drowsy after I ate, my mouth was always dry, and when a second medication was added, I began to lose control of my limbs and fall down. I insisted to my psychiatrist that it was the second drug that was causing me to fall. A champion of that one, he instructed me to discontinue the first. I responded in the way only privileged patients can: I went around him, using personal connections to wrest an informal second opinion from a resident in the lab run by my psychiatrist’s mentor. My doctor was convinced, and a little embarrassed, and we both learned something about therapeutic alliances.
[…]
Intertwined with this pharmaceutical saga are other, related biographical threads. Perhaps most importantly, I have been a psychotherapy patient off and on since age sixteen, and for the past fifteen years, I have participated in psychoanalytic psychotherapy to repair the effects of childhood trauma. This therapy has changed me profoundly, but Cymbalta changed me in a different way, and my psychotherapist agrees. The relative merits of medication, psychotherapy, and their combination are debated in the literature, but in my case, there was plenty of work to go around. There were also leaves of absence, hospitalizations, support groups of various stripes, and board membership in a mental health consumer group that refused, on principle, badly needed funding from the pharmaceutical industry.
What difference has Cymbalta made? There is, I think, no way to convey the anguish of mental illness to someone who has not experienced it. In the poem “Having It Out with Melancholy,” Jane Kenyon writes, “A piece of burned meat / wears my clothes, speaks / in my voice, dispatches obligations / haltingly, or not at all. / Is tired of trying.”Solomon’s father had to cut his lamb chops for him. In You Are Not a Stranger Here, Adam Haslett’s fictional character Paul tries to find meaning in his depression because “the opposite has always seemed more frightening to him, lonelier—the idea that so much of him was a pure and blinded waste.”
The suffering of depressed people does not justify the misdeeds of the pharmaceutical industry, nor does it minimize the drugs’ deleterious effects on some patients. However, discussion of antidepressants’ value should not forget this suffering or imagine that it is insignificant or suspect. In my experience, antidepressants are neither happy pills nor placebos; they are the difference between life and living death.
[…]
The intensity of the current debate unsettles me. I understand—and have been directly affected by—the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, the indeterminacy of clinical studies, and the substitution of chemotherapeutics for psychotherapeutics in psychiatry and health insurance policies. I lament, with my colleagues, the cost of unnecessary care and denounce, with my comrades, the toll of unnecessary drugging. I remember an earlier, mirror-image discussion of Prozac, and it was just as heated. In the 1990s, this drug was believed to be so effective, even in people without depression, that it might constitute unjust and unaffordable enhancement rather than legitimate treatment….
Medications that affect the mind seem to discomfit us deeply, culturally, viscerally. And so do the people who need them: psychiatric patients have gone, in this discourse, from covetous of an unfair advantage to oblivious to a colossal con. I am not sure which characterization I prefer, but I know my heart will break when a friend in the grip of depression forgoes medication—not because it is not right for her, but because it is only for cheaters or fools.
Why Does a President Need a Wife? →
For politicians in this country, family is not off limits—not really, at least. How can it be, when every time I go online I see a smiling Michelle Obama asking me to join her in supporting her husband, and Ann Romney is out deploying the first person plural? “Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling,” she said this spring.“That’s why we’re running.” Both of them are on Twitter, sidekicks if not running mates, with what must be approved and vetted tones and takes. It feels like voting for a Presidential candidate, in this country, means casting a vote for his marriage.
The reality across the Atlantic is different. Two weeks ago, François Hollande was sworn in as France’s new President. He and his companion, the veteran political journalist Valérie Trierweiler, are the first unmarried couple to reside in the Elysée Palace in its history. Trierweiler, whom Hollande calls “the love of my life,” has been married and divorced twice before, and plans to continue her work, if with a tilt away from politics. I fear that, in the United States, Trierweiler would be considered something of a loose woman—or just too complicated—and a man who tried to run for President while with her would face multi-million-dollar attacks for a lack of “family values.”
The French writer Laurent Binet followed the couple during the campaign for a book he is writing. “In France,” he told me, “we don’t consider it a crime to hide your private life: it’s even the meaning of the word ‘private.’”
Binet expects no backlash from French Catholics in response to this first First Couple “living in sin.” He points to the model of French laïcité—a state-sanctioned secularism forbidding religious involvement in government dealings, and vice versa—and stresses the Dreyfus-era guarantee that religions remain “in their place, which is to say in the private sphere,” he said.
“Manifestly, the fact of not being married did not prevent Hollande from being elected. It was never, throughout the entire campaign, raised as an issue.” He went on, “Hollande and Valérie Trierweiler have officially been a couple for five years. Seen from this angle, marriage would be only an administrative formality.”
A letter published in Le Monde celebrated the new “contours” Trierweiler brings to the role. The Lyonnais letter-writer invited her to “show respect to republican audacity, and do away with the old remnants of the ancien régime,” by demonstrating her understanding that the “corps amoureux” is of a private nature and should not blend into the “corps constitué” (the constitutional body), with its public essence. “It would be wholly beneficial for her, of course, and above all for democracy.”
Trierweiler has said publicly that she doesn’t expect Hollande to support her financially. He “isn’t the father of my children,” she stated, and that is not “my perception of life.” When Paris Match put Trierweiler’s image on a March cover, she tweeted, “What a shock to discover myself on the cover page of my own magazine,” and added, “Bravo to Paris Match for its sexism.”
This French “first girlfriend” met our own First Lady earlier this month, at the G8 summit. Trierweiler said that Mrs. Obama “was really one of the people who has most impressed me in all my life.” Admiring her charisma and force of presence, Trierweiler observed, “One would think she, herself, could have a political career.”
And yet Michelle Obama has had to suppress her career ambition to fulfill the ceremonial role. This is a woman who, after all, met her husband when assigned to supervise him on the job—Michelle mentored Barack as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm Sidley and Austin. She’s had to subsume herself into her husband’s brand identity, for the pursuit of popularity and poll numbers (his, if it bears saying).
[…]
Why must the President’s wife still be a wife above all? It is no longer a matter of looking like the rest of America. Women are doing better, economically, than ever: more women than men work in managerial and professional positions today (even if the glass ceiling keeps men in a strong majority in top executive positions), and more are enrolled in colleges and graduate schools. Unmarried, childless urban women in their twenties are out-earning men by eight per cent. Barely half of adults in the country are married (fifty-one per cent, as of last December), when the median age of first marriage is higher than it’s ever been (26.5 years old for women, 28.7 for men).
The Daily Mail published an article last week inquiring, “Is France’s new President about to pop the question and make his girlfriend Valerie Trierweiler an honest First Lady?” I asked Binet whether he thought Hollande and Trierweiler would decide to marry to smooth the diplomatic path. “No,” he told me. “If Valérie Trierweiler gets married, it will be because she wants to get married.”
my comic about rape jokes.
i’ll go back to dumb cartoons of ugly people soon i swear
Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget →
The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You’re sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you’ve forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup.
So there’s the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you’ve forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.”
[…]
Is it walking through the doorway that causes the forgetting, or is it that remembering is easier in the room in which you originally took in the information? Psychologists have known for a while that memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning; this is an example of what is called the encoding specificity principle. But the third experiment of the Notre Dame study shows that it’s not just the mismatching context driving the doorway effect. In this experiment (run in VR), participants sometimes picked up an object, walked through a door, and then walked through a second door that brought them either to a new room or back to the first room. If matching the context is what counts, then walking back to the old room should boost recall. It did not.
The doorway effect suggests that there’s more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried. Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff. Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an “event model,” and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues. That thing in the box? Oh, that’s from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that. Other changes may induce a purge as well: A friend knocks on the door, you finish the task you were working on, or your computer battery runs down and you have to plug in to recharge.
Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another? Because we can’t keep everything ready-to-hand, and most of the time the system functions beautifully. It’s the failures of the system—and data from the lab—that give us a completely new idea of how the system works.
Why is reddit 85% male and tumblr the opposite? In fact, why are almost all internet forums male-majority?
baconautics: The origins of the forums hold great weight in setting the tone, and since forum newbies adapt to the culture and promulgate it in turn as oldbies, the tone tends to perpetuate.
For greater cultural reasons, there is a disproportionate number of men in the “hard sciences” (to include computer science and IT); and a disproportionate number of women in fields that deal with art and aesthetics.
Reddit started as a neckbeard forum to talk about Haskell and such. Slashdot started off as Chips N’ Dips, a Linux neckbeard forum. And so forth. Even though they have opened up to handle a wider variety of subjects, the culture still retains vestiges of the previous generation (tropes and such) and so it tends to invite and retain neckbeards (primarily men).
Tumblr, on the other hand, started off as a way to microblog photographs; it was primarily a forum for artistic and aesthetic expression (though washing out a picture and putting a cryptic message in a serifed font isn’t *my* idea of expression). One must ask: who are the people more likely to care about art and aesthetics in Western culture?
So now I’ve shifted the question: why are men associated with neckbeardy things and women associated with artsy-fartsy things?
aaronin: The time span of the various communities have been in existence long enough that the “it started with X gender” argument is not true. Facebook started primarily as male, because men are more likely to be early adopters. But as a product progresses (a la facebook) the gender evens out.
The real question is: why haven’t the genders balanced out over the long life span of these two applications?
So here’s the argument [based off of an area of social sciences that you don’t assign a badge for on this community: technology science?, I digress].
Tumblr is essentially unique among social networks in that it is a one way service. It requires (asks) less of its users than a blog [meaning the barrier to participation is low] and requires less interaction from its users than other performance display spaces such as Twitter or Blogs [meaning the barrier to ongoing participation is low].
aside: There’s a hierarchy of participation on social networks:
Take your entire readership as 100%
only 10% are going to actively contribute to a community such as reddit This group tends to be male.
Only 1% are going to be extremely invested/top perfomers in a given community. Less gender skewed.
Basically reddit, digg, active twitter appeal to that specific 10%.
Tumblr has captured a niche which is that casual 90%. The lurkers.
Now look at casual gaming. Basically all of video games have strongly appealed to men. This isn’t because the games were strictly masculine. Its because of the time and investment appealed strongly to those who were already invested/interested in the technology. Women are now the majority of gamers, when you include casual [low barrier to participation] gaming.
So basically, my argument is that Tumblr has effectively enable the casual internet user in creating content in a way that Wordpress, Reddit have failed to do so. Tumblr is primarily female for the same reason that “casual gamers” are primarily female. I’d propose that we stop generalizing about gender (although an issue, tied into the culture of tech geekiness, not deterministic in and of it’s self) and instead talk about “barriers to participation.” Many male users of Tumblr are the lurkers, the “new” to the web (your parents, the elderly) and those who have less time (yes, gender studies, parenting, burden of childcare conversation fits in here).
Anyway this is why Tumblr is primarily female. And it has nothing to do with “artsy-fartsy” gender stereotypes.
(Source: reddit.com)
Why we lie →
Not too long ago, one of my students, named Peter, told me a story that captures rather nicely our society’s misguided efforts to deal with dishonesty. One day, Peter locked himself out of his house. After a spell, the locksmith pulled up in his truck and picked the lock in about a minute.
“I was amazed at how quickly and easily this guy was able to open the door,” Peter said. The locksmith told him that locks are on doors only to keep honest people honest. One percent of people will always be honest and never steal. Another 1% will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television; locks won’t do much to protect you from the hardened thieves, who can get into your house if they really want to. The purpose of locks, the locksmith said, is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.
We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. If this were true, society might easily remedy its problems with cheating and dishonesty. Human-resources departments could screen for cheaters when hiring. Dishonest financial advisers or building contractors could be flagged quickly and shunned. Cheaters in sports and other arenas would be easy to spot before they rose to the tops of their professions.
But that is not how dishonesty works. Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.
***
Much of what we have learned about the causes of dishonesty comes from a simple little experiment that we call the “matrix task,” which we have been using in many variations. It has shown rather conclusively that cheating does not correspond to the traditional, rational model of human behavior—that is, the idea that people simply weigh the benefits (say, money) against the costs (the possibility of getting caught and punished) and act accordingly.
The basic matrix task goes as follows: Test subjects (usually college students) are given a sheet of paper containing a series of 20 different matrices (structured like the example you can see above) and are told to find in each of the matrices two numbers that add up to 10. They have five minutes to solve as many of the matrices as possible, and they get paid based on how many they solve correctly. When we want to make it possible for subjects to cheat on the matrix task, we introduce what we call the “shredder condition.” The subjects are told to count their correct answers on their own and then put their work sheets through a paper shredder at the back of the room. They then tell us how many matrices they solved correctly and get paid accordingly.
***
What happens when we put people through the control condition and the shredder condition and then compare their scores? In the control condition, it turns out that most people can solve about four matrices in five minutes. But in the shredder condition, something funny happens: Everyone suddenly and miraculously gets a little smarter. Participants in the shredder condition claim to solve an average of six matrices—two more than in the control condition. This overall increase results not from a few individuals who claim to solve a lot more matrices but from lots of people who cheat just by a little.
[…]
Knowing that most people cheat—but just by a little—the next logical question is what makes us cheat more or less.
One thing that increased cheating in our experiments was making the prospect of a monetary payoff more “distant,” in psychological terms. In one variation of the matrix task, we tempted students to cheat for tokens (which would immediately be traded in for cash). Subjects in this token condition cheated twice as much as those lying directly for money.
Another thing that boosted cheating: Having another student in the room who was clearly cheating. In this version of the matrix task, we had an acting student named David get up about a minute into the experiment (the participants in the study didn’t know he was an actor) and implausibly claim that he had solved all the matrices. Watching this mini-Madoff clearly cheat—and waltz away with a wad of cash—the remaining students claimed they had solved double the number of matrices as the control group. Cheating, it seems, is infectious.
Other factors that increased the dishonesty of our test subjects included knowingly wearing knockoff fashions, being drained from the demands of a mentally difficult task and thinking that “teammates” would benefit from one’s cheating in a group version of the matrix task. These factors have little to do with cost-benefit analysis and everything to do with the balancing act that we are constantly performing in our heads. If I am already wearing fake Gucci sunglasses, then maybe I am more comfortable pushing some other ethical limits (we call this the “What the hell” effect). If I am mentally depleted from sticking to a tough diet, how can you expect me to be scrupulously honest? (It’s a lot of effort!) If it is my teammates who benefit from my fudging the numbers, surely that makes me a virtuous person!
The results of these experiments should leave you wondering about the ways that we currently try to keep people honest. Does the prospect of heavy fines or increased enforcement really make someone less likely to cheat on their taxes, to fill out a fraudulent insurance claim, to recommend a bum investment or to steal from his or her company? It may have a small effect on our behavior, but it is probably going to be of little consequence when it comes up against the brute psychological force of “I’m only fudging a little” or “Everyone does it” or “It’s for a greater good.”
Red clay, beaten earth →
The French Open started this week, and among my first tasks upon landing in Paris was to figure out how you actually make a clay tennis court. When you grow up playing tennis in the Midwest, or anywhere in America, really, there aren’t many opportunities to play on clay.
So, here goes: start with a layer of large stones, two feet thick, topped by an inch of gravel, five more of clinker—residue from volcanic rock that can absorb and retain water—and a top strata of limestone. This last layer is the one off which the balls at the French Open are actually bouncing, and the event’s organizers are proud to say that the stone comes from the quarries in Saint-Maximin, outside Paris, that were mined to build most of Haussmann-era Paris. The red clay is ground brick or tile. Each court requires more than a ton of the stuff, which is spread at a depth of only two millimeters. Why bother? This is Paris, so mostly style: “aesthetics, player comfort, and color” are the three reasons, in that order, offered by the Open.
“Clay is a subtle composition of elements, making it a unique and particularly noble surface,” the press guide says. The people who run the Open are clearly infatuated with the idea of their tournament as the most distinguished of the four majors. They note that “Les Anglos Saxons” call the dirt red clay, while the official name is terre battue. That’s “beaten earth,” which serves both literary and descriptive purposes. Matches on clay take longer because the ball moves slower, extending rallies, games, and sets. Clay specialists are known for grinding out matches in ways that frustrate those able to put more pop on their ball: Pete Sampras famously never won at the French Open.
Americans, especially, are at a disadvantage in the Open—clay favors creativity over power, and in the U.S., tennis is about power. […]
Still, the clay, and the artistry it supposedly elicits, is a point of pride in France. More from the press guide:
These materials, shaped by the teams at Roland Garros, become a playground whose qualities are limitless—land reserved for the giants of tennis. This work done, the artists can enter into alliance with the Earth. Modern players can express their inner Vulcan while giving the yellow ball trajectories that possess arabesque foolishness. For us mere mortals, it is simply the emotion of seeing this meeting between man and the beaten earth.This meeting of Vulcans takes work: nearly a hundred people are employed in raking and watering the grounds. Unlike hard courts, clay does well with a bit of wetness—though not too much—and the courts are submerged in water every evening for fifteen minutes. During the day, water trapped in the clinker comes back up in the form of humidity. The courts are then watered continuously throughout the day, between games, by teams of employees carrying large yellow hoses.
All of the aesthetic work does also have a practical purpose: “Players would be dazzled if they had to play on white limestone,” the guide says. But why red? Forgive the rhyme, but players were frazzled a few weeks back, in Madrid, where tournament organizers—presumably—had changed the courts’ hue to blue. Nadal was not happy—he lost—and when Rafael Nadal is not happy with a clay court, people take notice. But the courts stayed red thanks to simple coincidence: tennis, which was first played on grass, came to France in 1878, at Cannes, thanks to a pair of English brothers; the climate wasn’t quite right for grass, so they crushed up some bricks and covered the court. Thus, terre battue.
The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and the Netherlands have expelled top Syrian diplomats in the wake of government-sponsored killings in the Syrian province of Homs; more than 100 people killed by pro-Assad thugs, including scores of children. →
(Source: inothernews)
What teachers really want to tell parents →
“Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can’t deal with parents anymore; they are killing us.”
Unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Today, new teachers remain in our profession an average of just 4.5 years, and many of them list “issues with parents” as one of their reasons for throwing in the towel. Word is spreading, and the more negativity teachers receive from parents, the harder it becomes to recruit the best and the brightest out of colleges.
So, what can we do to stem the tide? What do teachers really need parents to understand?
For starters, we are educators, not nannies. We are educated professionals who work with kids every day and often see your child in a different light than you do. If we give you advice, don’t fight it. Take it, and digest it in the same way you would consider advice from a doctor or lawyer. I have become used to some parents who just don’t want to hear anything negative about their child, but sometimes if you’re willing to take early warning advice to heart, it can help you head off an issue that could become much greater in the future.
Trust us. At times when I tell parents that their child has been a behavior problem, I can almost see the hairs rise on their backs. They are ready to fight and defend their child, and it is exhausting. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, “Is that true?” Well, of course it’s true. I just told you. And please don’t ask whether a classmate can confirm what happened or whether another teacher might have been present. It only demeans teachers and weakens the partnership between teacher and parent.
And if you really want to help your children be successful, stop making excuses for them. I was talking with a parent and her son about his summer reading assignments. He told me he hadn’t started, and I let him know I was extremely disappointed because school starts in two weeks.
His mother chimed in and told me that it had been a horrible summer for them because of family issues they’d been through in July. I said I was so sorry, but I couldn’t help but point out that the assignments were given in May. She quickly added that she was allowing her child some “fun time” during the summer before getting back to work in July and that it wasn’t his fault the work wasn’t complete.
Some parents will make excuses regardless of the situation, and they are raising children who will grow into adults who turn toward excuses and do not create a strong work ethic. If you don’t want your child to end up 25 and jobless, sitting on your couch eating potato chips, then stop making excuses for why they aren’t succeeding. Instead, focus on finding solutions.
And parents, you know, it’s OK for your child to get in trouble sometimes. It builds character and teaches life lessons. As teachers, we are vexed by those parents who stand in the way of those lessons; we call them helicopter parents because they want to swoop in and save their child every time something goes wrong. If we give a child a 79 on a project, then that is what the child deserves. Don’t set up a time to meet with me to negotiate extra credit for an 80. It’s a 79, regardless of whether you think it should be a B+.
The Second Second Date Story →
My father passed away six years ago after a long string of battles with cancer, having come out of each battle victorious until at last it finally got the upper hand. Two days after he passed I picked my sister up at the airport and we went to visit my mother. We talked about Dad for a while at my parents’ kitchen table, sharing stories about both his last days and our earlier life together. At some point we reached a lull in the conversation and just sat there silently for a long while. And then, without really knowing why, I heard myself asking my mom the question I swore I would never ask her.
“Hey Mom, can I ask you something?”
She nodded.
“You know the story of your second date with dad? When he lost all control and pulled that guy’s mustache partially off?
She nodded again
“I can’t figure it out. Since you didn’t know him at all really, why did you ever agree to see him again after watching him do something like that?”
My mom smiled.
“Oh, that never really happened,” she said. “Your father made it up one night when you were both so little, and you laughed so hard and asked him to retell it over and over, so he did. It was something you kids never got tired of hearing, but it was just make believe.” I laughed, a little relieved; this made more sense, and fit better with the man I grew up with.
We all sat there for a while longer, and then after a bit my mom broke the silence again.
“The real story of our second date was actually a much better story, I always thought. Would you like to hear it?” My sister and I just looked at her, too surprised to even respond.
***
It is not winter, but spring in the Wasatch mountains. The young man and woman have been hiking amid the trees and wildflowers all day, and they have hardly said a word since they left the car.
It will be a while before either gets up the nerve to confess this to the other, but each of them had the same realization the previous evening on their first date. That realization, its truth hard and crystal clear as set diamond, is this: Each knows they have just met the person with whom they are going to spend the rest of their lives.
A prolonged silence with others they have know would have felt uncomfortable, would have demanded unimportant words to fill the awkward spaces. For some reason, though, this silence feels right. Everything, everywhere suddenly feels right.
The young woman reaches out to hold the young man’s right hand, and knows immediately that she has transgressed. For one thing, the hand feels wrong. Somehow the muscles in it don’t react in the precise way muscles in a hand should. She doesn’t know this empirically, of course. Her knowledge is instantaneous and born of instinct; besides, there is no way she could know that his right hand was a victim of childhood polio, or that he has spent a lifetime cultivating ways to use it that make it impossible for an observer to tell it lacks full functionality.
Worse than the lame muscles, however, is his reaction. She somehow knows, in the same way she had known that his hand was wrong, that he is ashamed and wants her to let go. Wants her to forget whatever she might or might not have felt. Wants to leave. She feels him trying to pull away, shaking off her touch.
And then the young woman does something unexpected, something that no one has ever done with the young man. She doesn’t let go. In fact, she strengthens her grip. She will later remember pouring everything into that grip, willing him to know without her speaking that she knows his secret, and that she doesn’t care. That even if she still lacks the courage to say it out loud, her feelings for him have already taken root.
It is their second date, and already she loves his imperfect hand.
And after a panicky minute he seems to know this. She feels his hand slowly relax, and then grip back just as tightly. He says nothing out loud, but she hears him nonetheless: “If you’ll really take me as I am, then I am yours for as long as you might have me.”
It will be years before they ever discuss or even acknowledge these events to one another out loud. But it will always be the defining moment of each of their lives.
***
My parents’ anniversary is today, or at least it would be if they were still here. My mother never really recovered from my father’s death, and fell victim to her own bout with cancer a couple of years after he passed away.
My parents were never the kind to take pictures, so our house was never filled with framed family photos the way my friends’ houses were. I was surprised when my sister and I found boxes of amazing photos of their early lives when we were dealing with their estate. There’s a picture of them that now sits in my bedroom, an 8×10 black and white photograph of them posing atop a Wasatch mountain. It seems unlikely it would have been from their second date, but I see that day in this picture anyway.
In this photograph they both look so young, so impossibly good-looking. On some level this is to be expected. My father spent his youth after WWII and college playing jazz for a living and learning to become a pilot; he had earned a reputation as a Playboy back when that was actually a thing. My mother was brash and independent, and did the very thing Salt Lake City ladies of her era did not do. She went to college, and then moved for a few years to San Francisco to explore the world and date bohemians. She dated Martin Milner for a bit just before he moved to Los Angeles to start work on Route 66. Then she got tired of that life and moved back home, as should would later say, “so I could be there to meet your father.” I’ve always known these things about them, but the photo in my bedroom makes that time before my sister and me somehow more real.
It is an odd thing to see your parents in a photograph like this. It’s a mixture of amazement that you could have come from two people so beautiful, coupled with the dull ache of resignation that of all the wonderful gifts they left you, those movie-star-looks genes were not among them.
They were many things, my parents, and most of those things were good. But in this picture, as on their second date, they are perfect.
Forgive me if I have chosen to switch from the meta to the personal today. But I wanted to find someway to say to them both, Happy Anniversary.
I miss you both terribly.
The Overthinking Person’s Drinking Game →
When you experience a vague sense of inequity or deprivation but don’t have a template for whether your expectations are fair, drink.
When you aren’t sure whether the lingering sensation that you aren’t liked enough is a rational response to unfair circumstances or is in fact symptomatic of your tendency to blame your environment for your own failure to self-actualize, drink.
Drink if you experience a sudden flood of shame at the realization that you haven’t done much to deserve really any of the things to which you aspire.
If you suddenly realize you actually felt militantly entitled to something while sabotaging yourself, drink twice.
If you spend a long time mulling the nature of ‘deserving’ and what it actually means, and if you can’t really resolve the question of whether anyone specifically ‘deserves’ anything and come to an impasse about chaos and the innate unfairness of life, drink.
When a person or situation isn’t what you thought it was going to be, and you can’t figure out whether this is your fault for projecting unfounded qualities onto the person or someone else’s fault for actually misleading you, mistreating you or letting you down, drink.
Drink when ambivalence haunts you.
If you notice that you unconsciously but consistently put yourself into situations that deprive you of your resources and move you further away from your goals, drink.
If you cannot work out whether your present situation, challenge, relationship et al is yet another state of unconscious self-sabotage despite the fact you feel deprived, drink.
If you can’t tell whether you’re actually in a negative situation or just an ungrateful person who blames everyone else for your problems, drink.
Drink if you aren’t sure whether you are assuming too much responsibility for your own current unhappiness or not enough.
If you find that after long hours of contemplative malaise you suddenly feel as if nothing in particular is actually wrong and you feel the desire to relax or celebrate, drink.
If you suddenly find yourself highly focused on gratitude and create for yourself a long list of all the things that you are doing successfully or correctly or that you are fortunate to have and want to feel unburdened or euphoric, drink.
If you can’t decide whether you are actually ‘celebrating’ or simply engaging in artificial gestures of relief, take two drinks.
If you can’t tell whether you are an overly-strict person with inappropriate guilt about normal human self-moderation behavior or an avoidant adult child making excuses for your poor coping, drink.
If you feel persistently like you are failing to grow up, drink.
If you can’t tell whether a certain youthfulness in others represents an admirable refusal to adhere to repressive social norms or an actual inability to deal with difficult adult challenges, drink.
If you aren’t sure what it is right to expect of yourself, drink.
If you aren’t sure whether you are repeatedly failing to reach a personal set of behavioral goals or simply consistently feeling inadequate no matter how hard you work, drink.
If you aren’t sure whether you need to ‘lighten up’ or employ more self-discipline, drink.
If you aren’t sure whether you do or don’t want to talk to your friends about it because you aren’t sure whether you are a reasonable person experiencing occasional insecurity or a neurotic person who cannot be soothed, drink.
If you suspect you might not even have much reason to be unhappy and in fact just overthink everything and lack a stable internal compass, drink.
If you think you might just feel lost because you drink too often, but then you think too much when you aren’t drinking, cry.
If you’d rather not think about this kind of thing right now or maybe ever, take two drinks.
Bill and Doug Got Married →
It was a small wedding. Bill and Doug arrived together for the ceremony, as for the past 50 years they had arrived together for everything. Each wore a braided gold band as a symbol of commitment. They were not dressed traditionally for such an occasion, but since it was theirs to celebrate, what they wore didn’t matter. They had only three witnesses: a minister, the minister’s daughter and a friend who would be taking photos. Bill was the best thing that ever happened to Doug, and vice versa. They stood and faced each other in front of a fake fireplace in Niagara Falls, Ontario, last July, in a brick chapel with a white awning painted with two blue hearts, one of the few places in the world where they were allowed to do what they were going to do; they held each other’s hand, looked into each other’s eyes, and said I do.
***
The wedding was about love, mostly. They were old now, and gray as seashells, and love was one of the only things of which they could be certain. Doug was 77, and his weak heart fluttered in the cage of his ailing chest. He had lost one of his hearing aids and the other was broken, and sometimes when Bill would call at him and call at him he would not hear; due to high blood pressure and physical strain from the bad heart his breath seemed to force its way out of his lungs. He loved to tend the yard, but could no longer do so. Bill, 73, had an arthritic left knee; he had stopped playing his beloved organ at church. They both had problems remembering things.
They had begun to make arrangements to move into a retirement home, and had learned they would not be able to live in the same room together. They were fighting the decision. The wedding, when it happened, would be about something else, as well—a kind of validation for those who had championed their cause. Bill and Doug shared their lives and their furniture and their CD collection and their love of art and a little gray house that was webbed by the long shadows of north Georgia pines in a suburb of Atlanta, and marriage in theory was not something they would ever need and they were quite certain that if they took the vows they would not be saying anything to each other that had not already been said before.
***
Wake up, my handsome man, Bill says to Doug on most mornings, looking across the bed to his companion.
Good morning—but I am not handsome, Doug replies.
Bill fetches him coffee: To me, you are, he says.
When they were younger, in the sixties and seventies, two Atlanta men a good twenty years from coming out as a gay couple, they masked their affections by living platonically, out of fear, and the above conversation is one they did not often share.
***
Two million, three hundred eighty-nine thousand, three hundred forty-four Georgians voted for Senate Resolution 595 in last November’s election, which equated to 76 percent of the vote. The amendment to the state constitution provided that Georgia would recognize marriage only as the union of a man and woman. Of course, neither Bill nor Doug is a woman. This means, barring a reversal of pervading beliefs, they will most likely never be allowed to marry in our state.
***
What is it like to be gay? Quite frankly, Bill and Doug did not ask to be gay. Perhaps the people who voted yes to Senate Resolution 595 can understand this; perhaps they cannot. Bill does not know anyone who chooses to be gay because frankly it is a nuisance. There was never a moment in his life when gay was not his orientation.
***
They came out 15 years ago. Everyone said, “We always knew you were gay.” They had been living together for four decades. There was suspicion.
***
They ate lunch together at the University of Florida cafeteria. They went to see plays at the drama department. They went to musicals. Maybe a couple times a month, they’d go to downtown Gainesville to a movie. Together. No one had cars in those days. They walked everywhere. They were best friends. They had common interests. They visited each other’s parents, which is what a courting couple would’ve done. In 1948, they went to New York City together. They sat up in a coach car, and didn’t get any sleep along the way. They went to the Metropolitan Opera. They cannot remember their first kiss.
***
Doug and Bill have wills. Since their marriage is not recognized in Georgia, Doug and Bill have had to plan for what will happen, financially, if one of them were to pass on. If he had been a heterosexual married man, when Doug retired as a University of Georgia professor of pharmacology, he could’ve chosen a payout option that would’ve covered him and his spouse. As a “single” man with a gay partner, which was not recognized, the option was not possible. There was only one option. Take a payout that ends when he dies. Bill and Doug’s financial planning has to deal with what happens if Doug dies first. They have planned for it, but feel crapped upon.
***
Love is beautiful. Love is two people who have been together for a very long time ambling into their kitchen which is half-filled with daylight, to make sure the little miniature greyhound resting on the kitchen seat has its food, and their feet in loafers rake slowly over the hardwood floor of a house they’ve shared for 40 years and they have sold the piano and will have to give it up soon but they still have each other. Love is boring. It’s yelling into a deaf ear, as Bill does, yelling at Doug to get the paper, and Doug turns and cups his ear and asks, “What?” Love is simple. They talk about gas mileage on the way to a restaurant, in the car.
***
Bill and Doug love each other more now than they ever did. Their marriage is not recognized in Georgia.
The Prettiest Boy in the World →
For even a moderately vain female, spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: If he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh—which, in his case, is flawless and poreless and has an English-rose luster. His mussed blond locks and the rounded width of his cheekbones bring to mind a young Brigitte Bardot. At 19 years old, he is six-foot-one, thin as the stroke of a paintbrush, and wears a women’s size 11 shoe, which he says is hard to find in couture but is sometimes carried at DSW. He is fey but not flamboyant. His only apparent physical imperfection is a pair of moles that hover gracefully over his lip on the right side of his slightly feline face. They are sometimes, albeit rarely, Photoshopped out.
[…]
In fact, to even describe his look as androgynous feels somewhat misleading; most strangers who encounter Pejic do not seem to doubt that he is a woman. He has only the faintest trace of an Adam’s apple. His jawline has remained delicate, and he shaves his legs but has no chest or facial hair to speak of. (“Feel my face,” he says at one point, grabbing my hand and bringing it up to his cheek, which indeed had only a light dusting of peach fuzz.) While I was with him, waitresses asked if we “ladies” needed anything else. People at shoots referred to him as “her.” “I don’t feel the need to explain myself,” says Pejic, who has nicknamed his androgyny and its concomitant confusion “the situation,” as in “they didn’t notice the situation” or “the Japanese just loved the whole situation” or “I like having a level of mystery to this whole situation.”
And though he may not exactly bristle at the gender distinctions made by others, he does question their underlying assumptions. “In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” He arches his eyebrows skeptically and asks, “Is that because women are considered something less?” Later, he tells me, “I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.’ But, you know, to me, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really have that sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am. The fact that people are using it for creative or marketing purposes, it’s just kind of like having a skill and using it to earn money.”
Androgyny has been a selling point in the fashion world at least since Coco Chanel jettisoned corsets in favor of sailor suits, but it’s always been a trickier, and more sexualized, endeavor with men. In the sixties, April Ashley’s career was destroyed when she was discovered to be a transsexual. Since then, there has generally been a level of campiness to men who modeled as women: Teri Toye, Connie Girl, and Candy Darling, Andy Warhol’s transgendered muse, all had a quality Pejic refers to as “We’re fabulous; fuck off” and which he views as less progressive because it drew attention to gender rather than moving beyond it. What he and others like the transsexual runway model Lea T are doing is sidestepping the gender issue altogether by not only passing as women but even managing to be a more ideal version of the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes. Designers can use them and feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm. “I think it’s the first time that it’s becoming so mainstream…. “I don’t think it’s a shtick anymore. The white girl is dead—or at least she needs to amp it up a little bit.”
Hardcore Porn Obsession →
I ask her what I asked Jerry and Ashley and Big Paul—if there’s anything that does it for her that she feels ashamed of—and for once I want to hear that there isn’t, that she really is okay with it, with all of it, that she’s achieved some sort of Zen-like state of personal enlightenment, of sexual wisdom, a meditative state of Non-Self-Loathing and Un-Reproach.
“Me?” she says, still looking down. “No way, uh-uh. I do it all, whatever.”
The people at the table behind us finally get up and leave. Layla watches them go. The bar seems empty, quiet. And at last she looks up at me and shrugs.
“Amateurs,” Layla says.
“Amateurs?”
She wrinkles her nose as if it’s disgusting.
“Home videos,” she says. “Just couples, you know. I like couples. It’s real.”
Missionary position, she continues, if she can find them.
“Lovemaking,” she says quietly.
“Sure.”
“You know?”
“Sure.”
She shakes her head, and pulls up on her tube top. What am I doing, her motion seems to convey, in this ridiculous outfit?
The waitress comes by, hands me the bill, and glances with contempt at Layla. Layla disgusts the waitress, Big Paul’s brother-in-law disgusts Big Paul, drunk-girl porn disgusts Jerry, Khan Tusion disgusts everybody. But nothing, if we’re honest, disgusts us more than ourselves. Our truest selves. The selves we give in to when we watch sleeping girls, and brothers and sisters, and Max and Layla, and amateur couples together in bed (missionary style if possible). The selves who experience these flickering moments of pure acceptance—that’s the real pleasure, isn’t it, the real joy?—when Shame and Sin watch from a distance, blessedly, briefly silent. Maybe that’s why we take such consolation in meeting other people with their own Max Hardcores, and, paradoxically, why we put our Max Hardcores in prison—because by declaring them obscene, we can tell ourselves that we are not.
