Pancake City

When I have an unpleasant task to do, I’ll read blogs obsessively to avoid starting it. Now I can do so while being ironic. The procrastination blog.

Q:What’s the best way to decrease traffic fatalities?

A: [...] Then there’s the painfully obvious things — don’t drink and drive, and wear a seat-belt (it’s amazing how many people who do the former don’t do the latter — not that wearing a seat-belt excuses drunk driving). But speed really lies at the heart of fatalities. When a car hits a pedestrian at 20 mph, the chances of survival for the pedestrian are roughly 9 in 10, when the speed is 30 mph, that drops to half. (link)

***

While each vehicle reaches its optimal fuel economy at a different speed (or range of speeds), gas mileage usually decreases rapidly at speeds above 60 mph.

As a rule of thumb, you can assume that each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.20 per gallon for gas. (link)

Meghan, this test was made for you.

* Clinton’s campaign is setting the stage for a protracted battle, at least publicly. In the link, her campaign manager claims she will have a delegate advantage by around June 7th, the end of primary season. The campaign is also fighting a battle in the media about the role of superdelegates, both arguing that they should exercise their own judgment (i.e. not mirror the wishes of voters, who have given Obama an edge so far) and that they shouldn’t be called superdelegates but rather “automatic delegates” because…I honestly forget.

I agree in principle with them that superdelgates should exercise their own judgment. That’s the whole raison d’etre for superdelegates. In the “should have though of this beforehand” category though, if the superdelegates actually selected a party candidate with significantly less popular support, the rift would severely damage the party, making one wonder why superdelegates exist in the first place.

* People have an intuitive but misleading idea that you can’t be a good orator and knowledgeable about policy at the same time. It’s the same thought process behind the idea that a gorgeous woman can’t be brilliant, or a professional sports player can’t be intelligent. What’s the basis for this idea? I believe it’s primarily two concepts: limited focus and necessity.  Expert skill takes many years to develop, so we assume that the star running back doesn’t have the time or resources to become well-read, and since he’s already successful in one area, what’s his motivation anyway? If you are gorgeous, the thinking goes, sure you can become thoughtful and well-read, but you don’t need to because you can get by on your looks. So why bother?

A third reason is that there is no overlap between the skills of policy wonk and orator, so it’s more difficult to believe the same person can possess those two skills.  In contrast, it would be easier to picture a construction worker skilled working on cars rather than one talented in writing poetry, although if you think about it, are there really any skills in common between building a house and working on a car, besides being able to lump both of them in the category of “manual labor”?

Related to all of this is the Academy Awards.  Seriously. Comedies almost never win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, if one is even nominated at all. For most people, moments of happiness or light-heartedness are fleeting, and the rest of the time is spent in a neutral or negative emotional state. We then engage in temporal reasoning and conclude that because pleasant moments are rare and fleeting, and make up a small fraction of our experiences, they are outliers and not “real life”. In other words, anything that makes you feel good can’t have lasting meaning, because we can’t help defining “meaningful feelings” as the ones that stay with us the longest.  If one believes that a Best Picture needs to say something meaningful about life, it becomes easy to dismiss any comedy solely for being a comedy.  Here’s some advice for any comedy trying to win a Oscar for Best Picture: don’t be too funny, and make sure to include some depressing moments as well.

The dynamics of inspiring rhetoric are different from those governing movies like “Juno”, but what they face in common is an almost insurmountable suspicion of the value of anything that is fleeting and makes one feel good. It’s a justifiable suspicion in many cases, like eating junk food or a juicy hamburger, but not always, and that’s what most people don’t get. Something can make you feel good and have deep value as well.

Have you ever focused on something so intently that it filtered how you viewed the world? When I used Photoshop intensely for a few weeks, I would have thoughts like “That’s a nice gradient in the sky” or “That azalea bush is over-saturated.” It’s the visual equivalent of staring at a black-and-white spiral for 30 seconds, then looking away at a blank wall and seeing the wall spin.

Maybe you worked 12-hour days for a few weeks writing computer programs and started seeing human behavior in code: IF sign=walk, THEN move forward. Perhaps after a long pottery class lampposts look more like shaped clay than steel, the rivets spiraling up the post formed by hand, not machine.

I find this disturbing, in a way, how easily our way of processing the world can be affected by selectively focusing on one activity for a while. I can’t quite put my finger on why it troubles me. Most of what makes people up is rigid and thus dependable. Our appearance, character, and manner of social interaction are slow to change.

But this other pillar of what makes us us, the way we look at the world, is flimsy. It changes all the time, sometimes in dramatic ways over a period of hours, just by doing an activity intensely.

Last night, I watched episodes of a television show (Heroes) for five hours non-stop. Part of the time I had a poker game running on the other background and occasionally pause and rewind the show when I had to play a hand. I remember seeing two players involved in a big hand out of the corner of my eye, and after pausing Heroes, my first instinct was to rewind the hand so I could watch it again, like I was watching another show.

A few other times I wanted to put a person I was talking to on pause, literally, so I could concentrate on something else for a moment. It’s jolting to have two areas of my life bleed into each other like that. It’s a brief glimpse into a warped reality, almost like a psychosis.

I wonder if there is any connection between this phenomenon and psychoses like delusion. If I saw a action movie where the hero was extremely paranoid, I would become a little paranoid too. What if instead of this feeling not being reinforced by my environment and fading away, it takes root through a small flaw of brain chemistry and starts reinforcing itself?

My thoughts are scattered, but I’m starting to wonder if the reason most psychoses exist is due to how easy it is to change how we look at the world. It’s not as much the absence of a big block of neurotransmitters, but the fact that perception is so fragile that it takes little to set it off-kilter.

Maybe there should be a new field of therapy called “reality grounding” (if there isn’t one already) that would help people recognize the influence of their actions on their thinking, especially during intense activity, and resist this influence when they want to.

As they relate to the election.

Denial
I can’t fucking believe this.

Anger
What the fuck is wrong with people?

Bargaining
I promise to be happy that Bush won if he promises to stop being such a fuck-up.

Depression
We’re so fucking screwed.

Acceptance
I’m moving to Canada.

***

I am struck by how many people seized on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ “Five Stages of Grief” to deal with the aftershock of the election.

Kubler-Ross proposed the stages in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying” as a description of the process terminally ill patients go through in accepting their illnesses. The stages quickly metamorphized and entered pop culture as an outline of the way people handle grief in their own lives.

For me, the stages aren’t distinct segments that I go through and move on, never to return. They’re more like favorite restaurants I revisit repeatedly, some more than others because Denial and Anger run coupons in The Washington Post often and the maitre’d at Acceptance Lounge and Piano Bar hates me ever since the last time I visited.

What happened is that the restaurant was closing, and the maitre’d came over and said in a snide voice, “If you need to be reminded what types of payment the establishment accepts, I will be happy to refresh your memory.” I got up from my table and responded: “That won’t be necessary. I got something you can accept: a punch in the stomach.”

The maitre’d wailed. “What are you doing?” I cocked my fist. “It’s called a mandate…for kicking your ass.” I punched him a few more times and then walked about the door.

So it will be a while until I can visit there again. But isn’t America awesome?

”Things that happen to you or that you buy or own — as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you’re wrong by a certain amount. You’re overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that’s true of positive and negative events.”

The New York Times has a great article detailing a psychologist’s research on happiness. The article won’t be as good as you think, but the pain fo registering to read the article won’t be as bad as you think.

This test is a short version of the Myers-Briggs personality test (the one that classifies you as one of 8 personality types– INFT, ESTJ, etc.) The results are rewritten to tell you what type of blogger you are. It’s only four questions but I agree with the answer (see comments). So, what blog personality are you? (Thanks to Sorting Thoughts for the link to the test.)

Occasionally after I wake up in the morning and go back to sleep, I’ll have an extremely vivid dream where I’m aware that I’m dreaming. Today, I watched several dozen people eat in a cafeteria. Every face was a new person: horn-rimmed glasses, a thin, brown mustache, a chin that curved outward like the moon. Every face was a stranger.

How does the mind conjure these faces? Do we secretly have near-photographic memories that absorb every new face in the mall, flag the details as trivial, and then dump them into a trashbin only accessible when we’re dreaming and our mind needs to generate a crowd in a flash? Or can we generate faces at will, picking and choosing features from people we do know and assembling them into a new composite? Like if you want to generate a vaguely menacing old man, you’ll pick the wrinkled brow from your grandpa, the narrow eyebrows of your physics teacher, and the jowl of Captain Kangaroo when he zones out and has a flashback to his days at Vietnam?

“Captain! I can’t move! I can’t make it over the minefield!”
“I won’t leave you behind, soldier. Grab on. We’ll jump over the mines together.”