The Deception of the Thrush

A day in the life: Here’s the proceedings of my Tuesday. I woke up at 6:30, anticipating my alarm by 15 minutes (I almost always anticipate my alarm by 15 minutes). I am glad it is morning; I am glad to see the sun.

I pack my lunch, including a turkey sandwich. I am skeptical of the turkey. When I was at the deli at Rainbow, I saw a new, store brand turkey that was on mega-sale, and I thought, how different could the store brand be? Eh, it was kind of fatty. Not real bad, but as I took my shower, and so on, I thought, God, I will be unhappy to encounter that fatty turkey at lunch. So I finally grossed myself out enough that I packed something else. The turkey’s going in the trash.

I arrive at work and my bike has to hang out with me in the lab for a while. The lock had gotten jammed the day before. Fortunately, not while the bike was locked to anything; the lock was just locked on itself. But that left my bike without any security so I spent the morning tripping over my bike indoors. Over lunch I went to the bike shop and they gave me a new lock, for free, which wasn’t a bad deal.

The afternoon wore on as I continued working on the blesséd cardiography paper. At work my ivory tower syndrome kicks in—I feel the blood drain from my face, the bags deepen beneath my eyes, my body temperature plummets, my brain slow to an uncreative crawl. I leave in the afternoon like Lazarus freshly risen from the dead. The world, people, sunshine, I forgot they were there.

I go to Rainbow, to get something other than the godawful turkey, and some other things. I want something quick for dinner, so I get insta-microwave-Thai-in-a-box (comical, that in the organic-natural-hippie food section, you can find insta-food). There’s a really nice woman who tends the self-service lines that I had met a few days ago, and she’s there again. I’m glad to see her.

I go home and go for a run. Some random guy asked me if I was “training for soccer” (we have some interesting characters in my neighborhood).

Upon return I have dinner, the long-awaited insta-Thai (it was some kind of peanut curry over rice noodles). It wasn’t bad. I do the dishes, and fold the laundry. These are both relatively pleasant chores. The thoughtless repetition is good. I think there’s pretty solid evidence that repetitive activity helps calm the body and mind; this is probably why autistic folks do the hand flapping thing, etc. In the end, we all have our own subtle versions of hand flapping; they’re just not things that other people can really observe.

As I am washing the dishes, “A Day in the Life” pops into my head. And an interesting logic arises: “That’s a really good song. The Beatles, they would understand me. The Beatles are from England. People from England would understand me. I should go to England.” The logic is flawed but if anyone has a spontaneous urge to show me London, then I’m ready to go.

So, here we are, 10:15 p.m., I am writing this. I will go to bed now. I am running out of good bedtime reading material. Recently I rediscovered Octavio Paz in my bookshelf. I had to read him for Intro to Literary Analysis, one of my Spanish classes. At first his writing has the feel of something very significant—and he is featured on some denomination or other of the Mexican peso—but then, after a while, he occasionally digresses into what may be haphazard, self-important self-indulgence. (Sorry, Octavio, no hard feelings). Anyways, I do have a tendency after I read things to adopt their style into my own stream of consciousness. Which may explain what I’ve just written here.

Posted by Karin Cox at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

--from The Wasteland (Eliot)

Monday, on Monday the gods were working against me….

Atop their mountain they said, let’s put a graduate student in your lab, a graduate student who never did you any harm, who just wants to borrow the computer, and as a test to you, he’s going to have a jumpy leg. A tremendously, tremendously jumpy leg. The jackhammer thing that you see in restless people, especially guys. Tap tap tap. Taptaptaptaptap. Tap tap tap. I say to myself, I say, It’s OK, just write your lab report, just think about impedance cardiography, fascinating impedance cardiography…tap tap tap. Pause. Oh, thank God. Then again: Tappity tap tap. Tap. Ok, deep breath, momentarily close the eyes. It’s OK. Tap. If I could only sever his foot off. Chainsaw.Taptaptap. That would be unpleasant what if I could just temporarily detach it, like he’s a little man made of Legos? No, don’t let the foot take precedence over the paper. The paper. Impedance cardiography. “Behavioral stressors have been associated with more heterogenous responses than…” tap tap tap. Failing the test. I start fidgeting. Do something Zen-like. There is no foot. What is the sound of one foot clapping. I know what the sound of one foot clapping is! Tap tap tap tap tap.

And then, he leaves. I wonder, how crazy did I look, did I appropriately conceal my inner turmoil? And the gods say, they say from atop their mountain, You’ve got a long way to go, kiddo.

I mean, I can’t blame the guy, everyone does the foot thing. I do the foot thing, amongst the whole twitchy repetoire I perform on a given day.

And what’s worse, it’s not just the foot thing. The most horrible one, the one that ate at my mind, was the Diet Coke Sip. Oh, God. Every time I went to Theoretical Neuroscience class, a psychology grad student, God bless her, a good comrade in the psychological arts, she sat a few rows in front of me. Everyday, she had a bottle of Diet Coke. She would nurse her soda (5 years in Minnesota and I’ve still resisted the word ‘pop’!) such that it would last the duration of the class. And every sip looked like this most controlled piece of choreography, probably designed to minimize class disruption. Every single time, she would grasp that bottle slowly, twist her wrist at a 35 degree angle, and ever so gradually that bottle approached her mouth and deposited a droplet of carbonated aspartame into her mouth, without the least slurping or sucking sound. She would then return the bottle to rest with such gentleness that she didn’t disturb a dust mote on the table.

Maybe 20 times per class, the ritual of the Coke. How did I ever learn anything.

All this is the mere symptomology of something much deeper. I think, how did these things gain a foothold in my consciousness, why do I even attend to them, and how can they needle me so? Trying to remember my mental state as a child, I cannot think of any real pet peeves that I ever had. In fact, I think I found it difficult to understand the concept of a ‘pet peeve’ altogether. Come to think of it, do kids ever describe anything as ‘annoying?’ I mean, I suppose there are some pretty blatant things you could do to annoy a kid. You could, for example, put gum in her hair. Or steal her crayons. But these are all very active forms of annoyance. Consider that with all the collective squirming that transpires in a first-grade classroom, you don’t see kids complaining, “Bobby’s knee won’t stop jumping up and down!”

Not to romanticize childhood, thank God it’s over. Maybe my irritability is the side effect of the adult luxury of not having to tolerate more egregious attacks on my peace of mind. Maybe childhood comes with an incredible sense of perspective: Don’t sweat the small stuff, at least Bobby is not putting gum in your hair.

You could also argue that the unique burdens of adulthood contribute to my angst. Eight-year-olds aren’t generally asked to exert the same degree of concentration on helplessly dry topics (“Today, kids, we’re going to write a ‘power paragraph’ on impedance cardiography…”) Kids won’t be bothered by potential distractors (jumpy leg) if they can safely indulge in distraction anyway.

But even after considering all the situational factors that may explain kids’ and adults’ discrepant behavior, I still think that there is a fundamental change, somewhere around puberty, that enhances our ability to pick out some completely innocuous stimulus and say “No! Stop it! No no no!” When I look back on this transition in my life, I think, was it all inevitable? Did these fingernails-down-the-chalkboard spring up on their own, or did I explicity adopt them? Was it all preventable?

Because as with any disease, prevention is so much more effective than intervention. I suspect that there was some conscious mediation going on when these phenomena gained the power to drive me mad. For each of the Jumpy Knees of the world, there must have been a time when I only saw only a hint of the nuisance that they would eventually become. And I decided to blame the Jumpy Knees, rather than my own wandering mind, for unsettling my equilibrium. And once surrendered, I was their slave.

So, what to do. I think I’m going to get a hacky sack, or a koosh ball, or something of that sort, something to squeeze the holy bejezzus out of, next time the gods come ‘round to tempt me. Because at the core of annoyance is that continual inhibition of some very strong impulses to act. Annoyance could be more or less the feeling of having to slap ourselves on the hand everytime our brain tells us to do what we really, really want to do (“Off with his leg!”) But again, this all begins with the fact that we blame the Jumpy Knee, which we cannot control, rather than our own consciousness, which we (sort of, but don’t push me on this issue) can control. But that kind of control, that executive control, it is really tough, and I’d be happy to provide a bunch of wimp-out neurological excuses upon request. As I said, it’s all much harder to stop once it’s already started. Better to go buy a hacky sack…

Posted by Karin Cox at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Every Saturday at 3:00 p.m., I am in my car driving home from my volunteer gig at Mercado. I click on MPR and listen to 'This American Life.' If you haven't heard of this show, it's a weekly program that presents various anecdotes of people's bizarre lives. Each program is centered around a theme; this week's theme is "My Experimental Phase." Click here to hear it. Look for the tiny RealAudio icon and that will play the entire program for you. I can't vouch for the first 6-7 minutes; I didn't hear that episode. But the episode about the Hasidic Jew/glam rock star and the audio clip from "Mortified" are definitely worth your time.

Posted by Karin Cox at 9:12 AM | Permalink

Below the posting “Hyper-intellectualism as psychiatric condition” you will see that I received a comment from Steve. I dedicate today’s posting to Steve, my one and only brother, 5 ½ years my elder, gracing St. Louis suburbia with his presence and serving Washington University as an employee who is far better than what they deserve.

Steve, at this point, is silently vowing never, ever to return to my web log. But don’t worry man, I’m not going to do most-embarrassing-stories. That would be a mean sister kind of thing. I’m going to say all the great things I know about Steve. Which seems like a decent use for a blog, to periodically display, for my audience of all of five people (ok, maybe six) to see, the traits that I most appreciate in my friends and family.

Without further ado, all the great things about Steve:

1.)Steve has an inimitable sense of humor. Kind of a Dave Berry/Dilbert/Al Franken mixture. Which means, gentle mainstream humor mixed with computer geek humor mixed with angry political leftist humor. And when we were growing up, he made all sorts of inappropriate sarcastic comments during church.
2.)Come to think of it, Steve makes all my major life decisions. For example, I just purchased a laptop (er, technically, my future graduate program purchased it for me) and Steve went to the Dell website and configured the whole thing for me. He’s decided which moving truck I should use when I go to Pittsburgh. And so on. If/when I have children, Steve will name them and decide what religion they will be raised in.
3.)Steve is one smart cookie—he’s smarter than you are, whoever you are—but he doesn’t lord it over anyone, is not hung up on it at all.
4.)Steve is a very good listener. During college I would call him up at 1:00 a.m. whenever I was bored with my homework and he didn’t once complain. People trust him with the details of their lives more than they would trust their priest, their therapist, anyone. He’s just got that kind of ear. Let me know and I’ll give you his phone number and you can try it out yourself.
5.)Steve and I are often irritated by the same things; we are more or less twenty-something-year-old curmudgeons. Mutual dislikes: stupid drunk people, shopping malls, whiny pop singers, the Dubya administration, perky people. As kids we both hated tomatoes. I’m not sure why we both developed the tomato aversion; our parents love tomatoes.
6.)If you’re stuck on a long car ride and have the chance to flip the radio on, there’s no better sing-along partner than Steve. Our greatest hits: What Would You Say (dmb), I Want My MTV (“We’ve got to install microwave ovens…”), Right Now (Van Halen) and anything in Steve’s Billy Joel collection.
7.)When I was, I don’t know, 7 or 8 or 9, Steve saved me from careening down to my mortal fate. We were biking on Jefferson street—the steepest hill in our neighborhood. The scene in my memory places him about halfway down the hill and I’m at the top, starting my way down the hill. Now come around children, let me tell you a story of back in the day when we didn’t all have fancy-shmancy bikes with hand brakes. No, no, we used the pedals to do this adept little foot-braking maneuver. It’s just that I wasn’t all to good at this adept little foot maneuver, and starting bolting down the hill, not knowing how to stop. As I sped past my brother, he thrust out his arm, effectively knocking me and my bike to the ground. I think the first thing I did was chew him out. He then he explained the logic of preventing my careening to my mortal fate. At which point I forgave him and I think I even thanked him.
8.) Nobody feels uncomfortable around Steve. My aunt Jackie once said he was like an old shoe. Which is a good thing. I think many of us have our ways of consciously or unconsciously projecting a demeaning attitude towards some people (I know I do it sometimes, which I realize and then feel bad). But I don’t think I’ve ever seen Steve do that.

Posted by Karin Cox at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Greetings, all, from Mercado Central. Today's been a busy day: I've helped people find low-cost medical insurance, tax assistance, directions to South Carolina....Finally, some down time. But no time to write any real posting. So I'll give you a pair of well-balanced, politically themed links. The first makes some valid points about liberals' patron saint, Michael Moore. I do have ambivalent feelings about him. I still want to see his movie though. And to see something really bizarre, take a look at the new Bush campaign ad that links Democrats to Hitler. It's some serious brainwashing propaganda. Amazing.

NYT editorial
Dubya campaign video

Posted by Karin Cox at 2:48 PM | Permalink

Anyone want my old Compaq? I'm selling it for $100.

Posted by Karin Cox at 12:40 PM | Permalink

I'm posting this except from an article written by a psychologist I met at the University of Oregon. I feel if any day I launch into some overly-abstract rant, I can appeal to the neurological condition that is described here, in the event that someone accuses me of being all pretentious-like.

And yes, reality does sometimes prove an elusive purchase...

excerpted from: Tucker, D.M. (2001) Motivated anatomy: A core and shell model of corticolimbic architecture

Similarly, the exaggerated intellectualization
of the left temporal-lobe epileptic may suggest
an exaggerated limbic constraint operating on the
normal left hemisphere contribution to cognition.
Although the analytic and rational cognition of
the left hemisphere is normally less constrained
by the affective limbic context than that of the
right hemisphere, there is still a limbic-cortical
architecture, with an inherent motivational basis,
even with the left hemisphere’s apparent
specialization for the neocortical shell. In this
framework, the exaggerated intellectualization of
the left temporal-lobe epileptic may be
instructive for understanding the motivational
basis of personalities in which the rational,
analytic, and fact-based cognition of the left
hemisphere is exaggerated, such as generalized
anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, or paranoid
disorders. In such personalities, the suppression
of personal impulses and the lack of emotional
coloring of behavior may suggest that motivation
itself is suppressed. But the left hemisphere’s
analytic cognition has its own motivational basis,
and it may become distored by excessive limbic
constraint. The emphasis on critical, fact-based
perception and analytic intellectualization can be
exaggerated in some persons to the extent that,
when grasped too tightly, reality proves an
elusive purchase.

Posted by Karin Cox at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have fixed the title bar. Yeehaa.

Posted by Karin Cox at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Maybe if I add an entry, my title won't be cut off anymore.

Posted by Karin Cox at 10:14 AM | Permalink