An Argument for Staying Plugged In

It was several years ago, on a bus ride back in Brighton where I first learned the value of traveling without headphones. I found that when I'm "plugged in," I tend to miss anything interesting or notable that might be happening right around me. However, sometimes I have days where I wish, more than anything, that I had kept my headphones on.

On this particular Friday, work hadn't been great: deadlines were looming, and my team had spent every lunch our that week working on meaningless spreadsheets that would ultimately accomplish nothing other than to cause us all to fall behind on our real work.

Having lost my lunch (i.e. running) hour each day, I was in a rather sour mood by Friday. My irritableness was only slightly mollified by the fact that on that Friday evening, I was meeting a friend to run in Central Park. Unfortunately, I would be plodding along for two slow, sore loops (12 miles) of the park, while he would be whizzing by on his bike, so it wouldn't be as if I had actual company. Really, I was just using his being there as motivation to get to the park at all. Still, the prospect of running--of accomplishing something for myself in a week when I had seemed to accomplish nothing--was heartening.

Then, I got on the train.

To be fair, my PATH train ride was relatively unremarkable. The train was slightly more crowded than usual, and there were some young kids creating a bit of a ruckus, but I had my book, was in a seat, and was therefore able to relax and read all the way to 33rd Street. Once I arrived at that station, I transfered to the D train, and again, much to my surprise and delight, I was again able to find a free seat.

I had just pulled out my book and was trying to ignore the protruding elbows of the man seated to my left, when the token homeless person emerged and began to make her speech. This woman, I kid you not, could have played the evil queen in Snow White--after she turns into herself into an old hag. The skin on her face was separated into individual folds that surpassed the definition of wrinkles by being defined and lumped on top of one another. A gigantic round wart pressed out of the top right corner of her forehead, near her receding hairline, and her nose bent to the left in a way that made her look as if she was perpetually sneering.

When this woman started approaching individuals and making her speech, she was still far enough away in the car that I couldn't quite hear what she was saying. Only after she had ofended young black woman and moved closer to me did I look up and see that she was coming along my row of seats. Her voice was a sing-songy whine, chanting, "I'm thir-sty, I'm hun-gry," and she held out her hands to each person and moved her face closer and closer until they were forced to make eye contact.

When she reached the man sitting to my left, he rummaged through the bag at his feet and held out a banana. "Nah," she said, her face contorting in disgust. She moved to stand in front of me, and I stared unseeingly at my book until she moved on to the man standing against the doors at my right. To him, she said, "Can you give something? I'm thir-sty. I'm hun-gry." Then, almost as an afterthought, as she turned to walk farther down the train, she muttered, "Who's going to suck your cock?"

Luckily my stop was soon after that, and I hurried up from the murky station full of its musty and spoiled smells. I had fortuitously chosen the exit closest to my destination--the Time Life Building--and so I relaxed my gait and strolling along amidst the roiling sea of people, toward the front doors.

Suddenly, a man wearing a plaid brown scarf, black coat, and holding a leather saddlebag over his shoulders stepped in my path.

"Are you going running?"

I had changed into my running gear before leaving work, so this seemed obvious. However, I thought that maybe this man was looking for directions in or around Central Park. Maybe he was visiting from out of town. Who knew? Judging from his attire, he appeared to be on his way somewhere, so this conversation shouldn't laste more than a few seconds.

"Yes," I replied.

"That's awesome," he said. "Do you usually run in Central Park?"

"Yeah," I told him. "I'm meeting someone there in a few minutes."

"As a runner, you probably don't like to spend too much on haircuts, do you? How much would you say you usually spend on a cut?"

Now my guards were up, but I had stopped walking, and he was being so friendly and casual about this, I felt trapped.

"Uh . . . maybe thirty-five or forty dollars."

He knocked the heel of his hand against his head. "Right! Well I work for a salon right around the corner and they're doing a special for athletes. It's an all-inclusive package with a facial and some wine. . . . You're probably not so into the wine when you're training, huh?"

"Yeah, not really." I breathed a sigh of relief and got ready to keep walking. This was my easy out.

"Well do you think there will be a time when you won't be training in the next eight months?"

Here's where I should have lied. I should have told him anything: that I was a professional training for the New York Marathon, that I was allergic to alcohol, that my sister cut my hair . . . anything. The problem is, because I don't make a habit of lying, the first thing out of my mouth, especially when I'm flustered, is usually the truth.

"Yes, I mean, probably."

"So where'd you go to school?"

This change of topic caught me completely off-guard.

"Um, University of Rochester."

"Upstate! No kidding. Do you know Canandaigua?"

"Uh. . . ." I shook my head.

"Like the lake? My parents live up there."

"Oh yeah."

Yeah! Cold huh? Really hard on the skin."

"Yeah it's pretty windy. Lake effect."

"Yes! Well you're not going to believe it, but we're doing this deal for 80% off. I know," he said, as if I had just given him a look of "this is too-good-to-be-true" astonishment, "hard to believe, right?"

I smiled weakly, starting to seriously worry. If I didn't extricate myself soon, I'd probably wind up buying whatever he was offering. It had happened once before.

"So what do you think? I--"

That's when my phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket and saw A___'s number on the screen. Smiling with relief, I turned and began to walk away.

"Sorry," I mouthed to him.

"You have to answer your phone." He looked like a snake that had just let the mouse run down its hole. I nodded and pushed the answer button.

"Hi, A___? What's up? You won't believe it but you called just in time. . . ."

Snapshot Book Review: Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My experience with this book was an unfortunate case of hearing too many rave reviews before I had the chance to discover it for myself. I will say that for a doctor, Verghese has quite a way with language. He also renders the most complex medical procedures with such simplicity and vividness that any lay reader can understand what is being done, to the extent that they almost believe they are there, watching at the patient's bedside.

Unfortunately, Verghese was only able to captivate me for about half the book, two-thirds at best. Once Marion left Ethiopia, the narrative became less engaging, less vivid. I don't know if it was because less time was spent on the characters around Marion (with the exception of Thomas Stone), or because everything moved too quickly or because there was too much exposition--I will have to reread the book again sometime in the future with a more analytical eye in order to determine that. I just know that by the time I was three-fourths of the way through, I already had a sense of what would happen, and I was impatient for the characters to get everything "over with."

Bottom line: excellent book about medicine, interpersonal relations, and Ethiopia, but Cutting for Stone doesn't sustain its own level of excellence throughout the entirety of the novel.

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Favorite Children's Book WINNER

And the winner, chosen by popular vote, is . . . If You Give a Mouse a Cookie! Runners up were Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day; Goodnight Moon; and The Giving Tree.

Other write-in suggestions were:

Where the Wild Things Are (Guess this person didn't see that amongst the options....)

Ask Mr. Bear

Angus & the Cat

Harry the Dirty Dog

The Story of Ferdinand

Bedtime for Frances

George and Martha

Old Turtle

The Giant Jam Sandwich

Apparently my childhood reading wax not as extensive as I had thought, because the only one of those write-ins I recall reading is Bedtime for Francis!

Despite If You Give a Mouse a Cookie winning this poll, walking amongst all the wonderful children's books in Barnes & Nobles distracted me so much that I ultimately purchased a different book. I will reveal my true purchase after this coming weekend, when I attend the baby shower and present my choice to the future baby's parents. In the meantime, however, I will mention that the book I truly wanted to buy apparently is no longer available in print.

I started my search at Barnes & Nobles, where the woman who assisted me laughed once she finally understood the title I was trying to tell her, and then laughed again when she discovered that it was first published in 1982. (I did not point out to her that Goodnight Moon was first published in 1947.) No Barnes & Nobles in all of NYC carries this book, so whe recommended that I search online, which I did once I returned home, only to find that even Amazon only sells the book via outside vendors! So if anyone comes across a copy of The Baby Uggs Are Hatching, definitely, definitely buy it. That book ranks among the most memorable of my childhood.

Snapshot Book Reviews: War

War by Sebastian Junger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was very obviously (and intentionally) written by a journalist: it included every factual detail anyone would want to know, and even self-accounts are written with a feeling of objective "remove." He looks at topics such as heorism, courage, and love with the interest and objectivity of a scientist--something which I find admirable, especially as he was able to also give compelling accounts of the actual men amid all that exposition. I also learned a lot from the medical and scientific factoids Junger laid throughout the book. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The basic neurological mechanism that induces mammals to do things is called the dopamine reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that mimics the effect of cocaine in the brain, and it gets released when a person wins a game or solves a problem or succeeds at a difficult task. The dopamine reward system exists in both sexes but is stronger in men, and as a result, men are more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games, and war.... Women can master those skills without having the pleasure centers in their brains--primarily the mesocorticolimbic center--light up as if they'd just done a line of coke.

Reaction times have been studied extensively in controlled settings and have shown that men have faster reaction times than women and athletes have faster reaction times than nonathletes.... The distance at which you might literally be able to "dodge a bullet" is around 800 yards. You'd need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you--at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards--a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react--the bullet has now traveled 400 yards--and half a second to actually move out of the way.

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Bad Days, Bad News, and Bad Stories: The Emotional Game of “Telephone”

Imagine a game of telephone: you sit in a circle with your friends and one person thinks of a message. She then whispers it to the person next to her, who whispers it to the person next to him, and so on, until it reaches the last person in the circle. That person then says the message aloud, and everyone laughs at how different it is from what the initial message was.

Bad days (and the bad emotions they generate) create an effect that is sort of like a game of telephone. Mr. A has a bad day. That night, he comes home and tells his wife, Mrs. A, what a bad day he had. He rants and raves and performs what we typically call "venting." Mrs. A feels so badly listening to him, that the next morning when she goes for a walk with her neighbor Mrs. B, the whole story comes gushing out. She cries on Mrs. B's shoulder, and then goes about the rest of her day not exactly forgetting the whole incident from the night before, but at least feeling a little better. After their walk, Mrs. B has a lunch date with her friend Mrs. C, and Mrs. B's outburst is fresh in her mind, so she tells Mrs. C. At this point, all the anger and sorrow has ebbed from the story; Mrs. B and Mrs. C. feel a bit of pity for Mrs. A and her husband, but they are easily able to shrug and go their separate ways. Later that night, when Mrs. C is sitting at dinner with her husband, trying to think of something to fill the silence at the table, she recalls the story Mrs. B told her and, in a very "You won't believe this" way, gives her own recount. She is so melodramatic in her retelling that Mr. C laughs out loud.

And there you have it: the end of the emotional game of telephone. An event causes an emotion that unleashes a story that transforms that emotion and shifts it from one polar opposite of the emotional spectrum to the other.

These emotional transformations, from sorrow to anger or anger to hilarity, are only possible because the emotions become stories and the stories are told and retold. Ultimately, the transformation is in the telling.