Relativity and Gatorade



This year marks the 100th year anniversary of Einstein’s "miracle year" of 1905. This was the year in which he published five papers including those that formed the basis of quantum theory and the theory of special relativity.

Today also marks the two-month anniversary of G’s move to Ottawa for the year, my move to my new place, and our starting our respective new jobs.

"How is it," G asked me, "that looking back on the last two months, it seems like I’ve been here forever. Yet the time feels like it has gone by so quickly?"

This is exactly the way I always feel when I have been traveling: I look back and measure the number of new experiences I have had and the new things I have learned, and judging from these memories, I can’t believe that my time could have held all these events.

But then, my time has been so enjoyable that I am also astounded by how quickly time seems to have slipped away.

This leads G and I to form our own theory of relativity, which indeed, echoes some of Einstein’s thoughts:

The measurement of the speed of time is in part dependent on the position and perspective of the observer where:

The perception of the speed of time from the perspective of an observer reminiscing is inversely proportional to the amount of new and interesting experiences had;

Whereas the perception of the speed of time from the perspective of an observer judging the current speed from her point in time is proportional to the amount of fun currently experienced.

Thus, there are two ways to lengthen your life:

One way is to plan on having an excruciatingly boring life. Indeed, this is the approach that the character Dunbar takes in Joseph Heller’s "Catch 22." He spends his time shooting skeet because it is something he hates to do. Therefore, it slows time and makes his life seem longer.

The other way, is to make sure that one’s life is jam packed with new experiences so that when reflecting back, there will be many distinguishing markers of time.

This is the approach that I have resolved to take.

I am beginning to find that my weeks are flying by with one day melting into the next. On Friday, I can’t quite figure out what happened to Wednesday or Tuesday.

Routine is the enemy of time.

Therefore my plan is to break the routine in as many ways as possible. I’m trying to brainstorm some ideas:

-Taking a new walking route to work every morning.
-Buying my coffee from a different café.
-Trying a new hairstyle.
-Speaking with a different accent every day

I’m open to suggestions.

I understand that offices and routine are a logical function of our need for productivity. I just want to make sure that when I look back, I don’t feel that I have efficientized those important life things that are best enjoyed through good, distinguishing, and inefficient time use.

***
The Little Prince
[ Chapter 23 ]

- the little prince encounters a merchant

"Good morning," said the little prince.

"Good morning," said the merchant.

This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink.

"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

"Anything you like..."

"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

Reasonableness Simpliciter

The plastic words that fill the page,
Swirling, cascading from my grasp,
Meaning less and less with each moment.

I grasped the fabric, but then it frayed.
The plastic melted and dripped away.
It pooled in a puddle on the floor.
A word soup that glistens and beckons me.
But the soup is dry,
My bowl is empty.

All that is left is a gigantic smudge.
Where reason used to lie,
Where understanding never settled.

Jade is the New Blue

We don’t just get sad anymore. We become jaded.

I think there is a difference.

Those who are sad mourn their current losses, but can imagine an end to their melancholy, whereas those who are jaded are not only unhappy in the present, they become skeptical that the future holds any more promise. In short, jaded people become bitter people.

People are jaded by their job, jaded by the ‘dating scene,’ and jaded by politics.

But who are these jaded people?

You might expect these jaded people are intellectually challenged, unemployed, or full of debilitating acne. Nopers.

One is my attractive young friend who has a great job, good lifestyle, but despite meeting many eligible dudes, she can’t seem to find one she really likes (or at least not for long). Another is a brilliant ex-colleague who has tried out a number of careers, is successful at all of them, but constantly feels miserable in his job due to the nagging suspicion that a far more fulfilling job is out there.

Most people would be green with envy.

Isn’t it strange that the word "Jaded" means the opposite of "Jade." How is it that a beautiful, green, semi-precious stone is related to the word for a state of sad bitterness?

After some fruitless "google" searching, I decided take the old-fashioned route of searching through the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. What I found was quite interesting.

Apparently there are two meanings of the term "jade." The first is the stone. The next is reproduced below:

Jade(2)/dzeid/n.1. an inferior or worn-out horse. 2. Derogatory: a disreputable woman

Okay, so jaded is not related to the stone. I choose not to explore the relationship between these two meanings of Jade(2).

Now, here is the interesting part:

Definition of Jaded:

Jaded/’dzeideit/adj. Tired or worn out; surfeited

Surfeited/v. 1. fill, supply, or feed to excess. 2. Be or cause to be wearied through excess

Whereas we think of jaded people as those who are missing something, the Oxford reveals that jaded people suffer from too much.

It was with this idea in mind that the book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less" by Barry Schwartz caught my attention.

The thesis of the book is simple. To a certain extent, having choices liberates us. But past a certain point, options paralyze us and can make us less satisfied with the choices we actually make.

Schwartz illustrates this phenomenon in a number of ways. My favourite example is an experiment that was done with chocolates. One group in the experiment was asked to choose one bonbon from a small box of chocolates. The other group had a much larger variety to choose from. Then each taster was asked to rate their satisfaction with the chocolate they chose.

Almost invariably, the tasters who had had a far smaller selection rated their satisfaction higher.

Schwartz illustrates why it is that too much choice ends up lessening our satisfaction with our education, or relationships, and with our jobs.

One of the main reasons for this phenomenon, he argues, is due to regret. The greater number of options we have, the greater number of things we ‘give up’ once our choice had been made.

So where am I going with all this?

Am I advocating for a new totalitarian Canadian society? Do I think we should all cease personal grooming in order to make ourselves less attractive (and thereby decrease our mate options)?

Maybe.

Schwartz suggests we work at lessening our regret by making irreversible decisions (so we’re not always thinking ‘what if’ and looking back. He also suggests we become aware of sunk costs of our decisions.

Personally, my going-forward strategy is to never make a decision…

Magic 8 ball says: Response hazy, try again.

Brunch and World Peace




Perhaps I have just been trained to question the assumptions upon which socially constructed lines are drawn. Or maybe I was simply drawn in by the promise of unlimited refills of coffee. But in the past few years, I have come to embrace, and indeed to love, the wonderful ambiguity of brunch.

For some it is about pancakes, for others it is about roast chicken. But for all of us who participate in the weekly ritual of brunch, it is about reclaiming a meal, and making it uniquely our own.

Brunch stands proud in the face of breakfast and lunch, the slaves of gastronomic regimentation. The morning and afternoon meal were invented for reasons of efficiency, crudely balancing our biological needs on the one hand with our drive for maximum productivity on the other.

However, on Sundays, I refuse to have the social forces dictate when I can and cannot eat my eggs. I defy anyone to deny me a waffle at three in the afternoon. I am the master of my own meal.

But brunch is not only about the blurring of time/food-specific lines. For me, there are also social and psychological benefits to relaxing the grind of daily routine. Sure, I see friends during the week. Usually we cram each other in between a meeting and hip hop aerobics. Great, let’s sit, have a coffee and a meaningful catch-up session in 35 minutes. Shit - better make it 30. My best conversations with friends often occur over our third cup of coffee. By that time the superficial pleasantries are through, and we have that happy and focused on each other caffeine buzz.

Of course, some people require a period of acculturation before they "get" brunch. I went for brunch a few weeks ago with a friend who spent the whole sipping-coffee-waiting-for-food period of brunch (which is my favourite brunch period) on her blackberry. Then, once the food arrived, she frequently checked her blackberry. She sporadically felt phantom (i.e. false) vibrations in her purse. Never a good sign.

This morning, after reading the paper, I started to feel a bit guilty about focusing this blog entry on the topic of brunch. There are horrible and catastrophic events occurring all over the world. How shallow am I that I choose to take up time and webspace with a tribute to eggs?

I spent this past Thursday fasting on Yom Kippur - the Jewish day of atonement. We are supposed to repent for what we have done wrong and commit to mending our ways in the coming year. While I’m very far from religious, I always fast on Yom Kippur. For me, the fast has a number of humanistic spiritual benefits. One is that it sensitizes me to the plight of those who routinely go without food and reminds me of how privileged I am.

In fact, many of the Jewish rules and regulations focus on food. What we can eat, what we can’t eat, and how our food should be prepared. In trying to get a satisfactory explanation for why we’re not supposed to eat pigs (these days they’re clean, and tasty, right?) a number of sources tell me the same thing: the point perhaps is not that we can’t eat *pigs,* per se, but that we can’t eat *everything.* The kosher laws are supposed to be, if nothing else, a self-enforced pause. We are to become conscious about the food we eat and the act of eating itself.

Indeed, as I sit at my desk and mow down on granola bars, or shovel bran flakes into my mouth while standing up, listening to the radio, and brushing my hair in the mornings, the act of eating is mechanical, semi-conscious, and certainly unappreciated.

And then it hit me - for me brunch is a good and nearly spiritual endeavour. I slow down. I appreciate my food. I appreciate my friends. I take time to give thanks for what is important. I make plans to do good things in the coming week. In short, greasy spoons are my church. And I would say that $4.99 for eggs, toast, hash browns, and coffee is a small price to pay for a little piece of heaven.

The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night-Time

[Warning: This concept is utterly stolen from "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Mark Haddon]

This a mystery entry. I have changed the names of the parties to protect their identities.

As I rode home from Abby’s on my bicycle late that night, two yellow cars zoomed by me. And I knew it was going to be a Bad Night. Just that morning, I had seen three red cars in a row. It had been a Very Good Day. But, as Siobban says, sometimes your day can take A Turn For the Worse.

This was what happened.

I entered my apartment and turned on my computer in order to check my Hotmail email account. I like checking my hotmail email account because I like email.

My Hotmail email account showed that I had "One New Message."

The message was from "Anonymous."

This was my First Clue that something was amiss. In detective stories, clues are often coming from Anonymous Informants. People who are Anonymous have something to hide. Sometimes they are running from the Mafia. Other times they are involved in torrid love affairs and don’t want to be Found Out.

This Anonymous message was a message that had been posted to my Blog.

I opened the message. The message said something Not Nice about another person.

Sometimes I want to say Not Nice Things about others. But Mother says that I should keep these things to myself because saying them out loud Hurts People’s Feelings.

I told Mother that this does not make sense. People have feelings. Feelings don’t have feelings. People can be sad, or happy, or cranky, or angry, or surprised. Furthermore, people can be hurt. But feelings cannot be hurt.

Then Mother got pink in the face. This was how I knew that I had said something to upset her. She said: "Fine then, saying Not Nice Things makes people feel sad."

And then I understood.

So this was how I knew that I had to Do Something about this Not Nice Comment.

I logged onto my blog and deleted the comment. I replaced it with my own comment that echoed the words of Mother. I told people to be nice.

But now there was a Mystery to be solved. I needed to find out who Anonymous was, so that he or she would not be Not Nice on my blog ever again.

In detective stories, they call this Getting to the Bottom of Things.

So I looked at my blog for Clues.

I noted the time of the Anonymous entry. It had been posted at around 9 p.m.

First, I thought about who else had previously posted at 9 p.m. in the evening. I remembered that there had been an advertisement posted to my blog a few weeks ago that had been posted around that time on a Saturday night. The advertisement said:

"Nice blog! Please be sure to check out my website where loads of inexpensive pharmaceuticals can be ordered and delivered right to your door! We specialize in drugs for male potency."

However this clue was a Classic Red Herring.

A Red Herring is a clue that is not a real clue. It leads you down the wrong path to a dead end.

I reasoned that this Advertisement had been randomly generated and posted to my blog. Computers randomly generate and post advertisements. Computers, of course, can be programmed to generate mean messages and post them on blogs. However, it was highly improbable that I knew the person who had programmed the program that randomly posted pharmaceutical advertisements to blogs. Therefore, the Advertisement Post was a Classic Red Herring.

Since this was a Saturday night, I reasoned that the person who had posted the Not Nice Comment was someone who either did not have much of a social life, or was sick at home.

I knew one person who was sick at home. The Woman Who Lives Upstairs was sick at home. However, she was currently without access to Internet. Therefore, it was unlikely that she had posted to my blog.

I have one friend, Gretzky, who is sometimes a hermit. This friend is also sometimes grumpy and sometimes makes Not Nice Comments. We would be meeting the next day to do some writing. He is working on a book. It is about how he should run the world. He was now my Prime Suspect.

I was now quite tired. Detective work takes a fair deal of energy. In addition, I had consumed quite a bit of alcohol that evening. I thought that perhaps my sleuthing skills would be sharpened after eating a giant chocolate chip cookie and having a Good Sleep.

I woke up the next morning and met Gretzky.

Unfortunately, all my Detective Work had been a waste because Gretzky capitulated and Confessed Everything the moment I saw him. He was without remorse.

But at least the mystery had been Solved.

Funny Folk

I’m sitting across from Andrew at Starbucks. He asks me a question, and I respond in earnest. A very amused smile spreads across his face. A disconcerting smile.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I demand.

“You’re a Funny Person, Nadine. A real ‘hoot’”

Funny Person. A title to which every young woman aspires.

“What do you mean Funny Person? Do you mean like ‘haha’ funny?”

I come from a family that speaks in euphemisms:

Fat = ‘Cute’
Stupid = ‘Kind’
Drunk = ‘Happy’
Mega Evil Bitch = ‘Mildly Moody Woman’

“Funny” is the place holder for many undesirably qualities:

He’s a big-time perv = ‘he’s Funny’
There is penicillin growing on that odious cheese = ‘it has gone Funny’
He farts like a pig = ‘His stomach is a bit Funny’

I immediately get my back up the second I think someone is euphemising me.

“Nadine, you are funny in Every Way,” Andrew answers.

Fanbloodytastic.

I’m no comedienne. Yet, I have often had this title of Funny Person applied to me.

I think that many of my friends, unfamiliar with the neuroses stereotypically characteristic of Women of the Tribe, mistake my baseline disposition for an expression of intentional comedy.

My friend, HoneyBunny, certainly made this mistake. Convinced that I was actually a ‘haha’ Funny Person, she and her boyfriend asked me to give the speech at her 21st birthday party.

The funny thing about HoneyBunny was that there was absolutely nothing funny about her. I tried to recall a funny story about her. I came up completely empty.

HoneyBunny is the most horrifically normal person I have ever met. No weird quirks. No drunken foolery. No lapses in judgment. No obsessive tendencies. She was a good student. She respected her parents. She never littered.

I therefore did the only thing I could do in that situation. I wrote a very sappy and comatosely boring speech: “Top 10 things I like about HoneyBunny.” I wonder what boring speech writers did for material before David Letterman?

At the conclusion of my speech, HoneyBunny came across the dance floor towards me, with a palpable look of disappointment on her face, to give me a hug. She whispered in my ear:

“Thanks. But you weren’t really funny, were you?”

I recently completed an unofficial internet poll:

Approximately 80% of MSN Chatters prefer “lol” to “ha.”

But nearly 100% of MSN Chatters use either “lol” or “ha” once or more in a typical MSN chat.

Next I spoke to a bunch of MSN Chatters by telephone.

Less than 40% either laughed out loud or audibly “haha-ed” during our live conversation.

This leads me to the conclusion that either people are way funnier by MSN, or else people like the idea of laughing, or want others to think they are laughing, but don’t actually engage in much physical laughing themselves.

I’m inclined to believe it is the latter. People like the idea of laughing. People who laugh are fun to be around. They keep things light.

But not always.

I went to a book talk by Thomas King, who was born to a mother of Greek/German descent and to a Cherokee father. His books often touch on difficult issues surrounding Aboriginal culture and Native Rights. Plus, his books are freakin’ hilarious.

When asked about his use of comedy, he explained that being funny allowed him to be highly critical of white society but in a form that is palatable to his white audience. He also felt that the benefit of dishing up social critique in this comedic form was that the message tended to stick around longer with its recipient.

He said what depresses him most about being a Funny Person is that a sad number of readers don’t realize that his comedies are actually tragedies.

I know a tragic Funny Person. He uses comedy as a self-defense mechanism. He shields himself in a cloak of sarcasm that repels any serious or difficult issue in his vicinity.

He is very sad to be around.

So I take stock of all the types of Funny People I could be:

HaHa Funny
LOL Funny
Tragic Funny
Weird Funny
Neurotic Funny
Rotten Funny
Pervert Funny

I decide that I disagree with Andrew. I’m not funny in Every Way.

I consider the fact that Andrew, a 27-year-old, has told me: “you are a real ‘hoot,’” and “I get a ‘kick’ out of you.”

I decide to add another Funny to my list:

Anachronism Funny.