“There are thousands of tiny black things going through you all the time,” the younger announced while she was eating breakfast.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Thousands of tiny black things,” she repeated.

“Do you mean dust?” asked He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved. “Or do you mean cosmic rays or dark matter?”

“That one,” she said, nodding.

“Dark matter?” (We had learned about dark matter at the planetarium.)

“Yes. I can feel it going through me.”

“No. You can’t feel dark matter going through you.”

“I can feel it.” She started giggling. “It tickles when it goes through me!”

“I wish I could feel it!” I said.

Later, as we set off for preschool, the younger grabbed my hand.

“Let’s run and chat!” she commanded, in her particular way, at once imperious and kindly.

“So …. ” she prompted me, “…. What shall we chat about?”

“Ummmm … what’s your favorite thing to do?”

“Running,” she answered without hesitation. “Running and eating. Who is the fastest runner in the world?”

“Mo Farah,” I replied without hesitation.

“Can he run faster than anyone?”

“Well, he can run certain distances faster than anyone.”

“Could he run to the airport?”

I paused to consider how far it was from the block we were on to LAX and also why Mo Farah would want to run to LAX from Santa Monica.

“I suppose he could.”

“He could carry lots of specially trained babies who could hold on to him while he was running!”

Now I was totally lost. “Babies? Why would there be babies holding on to him?”

“So they could take a flight with him,” she explained impatiently, as though she were stating the obvious.

While I was contemplating in my mind’s eye the image of Mo Farah running steadily to LAX with several specially trained babies clutching him, the younger let go of my hand and staggered around on the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the road.

“Oh! Oh! I can feel the earth turning! It’s making me dizzy!”

She fell to the grass and plucked a dandelion.

“This is a baby,” she observed, “because it’s yellow.”

She contemplated it.

“Do you need more than one seed to make babies?” she asked. She revised her question: “do you need two seeds to make two babies?”

“Errr …. Hmmm … good question …yes … usually …” It was not entirely clear whether we were discussing dandelions or humans but, assuming the latter, I felt obliged, on behalf of my sex, to dispel the idea that all you needed was a “seed.”

“But you can’t make a baby with just a seed. You also need an egg.”

She looked baffled. “An egg that you eat?” she asked incredulously.

“No, no, an egg that’s inside the mother. And the seed fertilizes the egg.”

“And then you make the baby in that way that you told me about before?”

“Uh … yes?” I replied uncertainly because I didn’t recall specifically what I had told her before. It seemed likely, though, I reasoned, that my past self wouldn’t have grossly misled her.

“So it’s pretty easy to make a baby then?”

I remained doubtful that we both had in mind the same actions.

“Yes. Well. Actually. Not necessarily. [1] It can take a long time. And the baby has to grow inside the mother for nine whole months.”

“Hmmm.” She was losing interest. She dropped the dandelion on the sidewalk.

“I don’t want my flower any more. I don’t want to pick flowers any more,” she continued, as we passed a patch of daisies.

“That’s fine.”

“I used to smell the flowers … when I was with Daddy … when I was young …” she mused, wistfully.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, I thought.

“Uh … you can still smell the flowers with me if you want to.”

“No, I can’t,” she murmured plaintively. “Because at the weekend you’ll be working.”

Now I could feel the dark matter passing through me, with an evil stabbing motion.

“That is not true,” I insisted.

“It is true,” she maintained, “you’ll be writing your book.”

“No I won’t!” I protested. “I finished my book, remember, and I haven’t been working on the weekends any more!”

“Yes, but soon you’ll write another book.”

“But I won’t need to work on this one at the weekends.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t feel like I have to work all the time any more.”

She nodded. “Because … the people from your work won’t know you’re not working at the weekends because they won’t be at our house!”

“Well … I suppose that’s true,” I agreed, “but that’s not exactly what I meant. Do you remember what tenure is?”

“Tenure’s like the MasterChef Junior finale,” she said, nodding sagely.

“Is it?” I asked.

“Yes, she explained, “because Nathan won the trophy and he gets to keep it forever and ever and that’s what tenure is.”

“I suppose it is, sort of.”

“And do you get a trophy?”

“No. Well, I don’t think I do. Nobody mentioned a trophy.”

She looked at me with real pity. “I’ll make you a trophy,” she said.

Notes

[1] A few years ago, at a baby shower (this setting is relevant in a deeply ironical way), I was chatting to another academic in attendance, someone I don’t know well. “And how is … is it a son, you have?” she enquired. “A son and a daughter,” I replied. She looked at me with real astonishment. “You have two children,” she stated slowly, as if the very idea was preposterous. “My goodness,” she added, “you’re very prolific.” Her use of that adjective practically demanded a reply that made reference to publishing, and so I obliged, observing that I wished I could be as prolific in authoring books as birthing children. She looked at me and observed, tartly, “Well, writing books is much harder than having children. To have a child all you have to do is have sex!” And then she turned and walked away.

I have to begin this post with some pre-emptive defensiveness in order to deflect any eye-rolling that may ensue as you read on.

You know the kind of person (I would say a woman, but that’s just stereotyping) who will sometimes announce in a breathy voice while looking deep into your eyes and placing a hand on yours, “I’m just a very tactile person”? [1]

Well this post is not about how I am that kind of person. I think I’m a standardly tactile person, neither more nor less tactile than average. I have an unfairly caricatured image of the “very tactile person”; they like essential oils and tossing their hair; they like scented candles and suggestively caressing their wine glass. I’ll tell you who epitomizes this person, in my view. Did you ever watch Star Trek The Next Generation? Do you remember Deanna Troi? If the name doesn’t ring a bell maybe this will: she was the only crew member on the Starship Enterprise who was issued a plunging-V-neck Federation uniform. She was an “empath,” half human and half some kind of telepathic alien race. Her empathic abilities often manifested themselves in the form of bosom-heaving, fainting, and sensuous eating of chocolate ice-cream.

Anyway, I’m digressing. The point is that today’s dispatch is about a pleasurable sensory experience (not so much a tactile experience as an auditory-and-peripherally-visual experience, actually), but it is not pleasurable in some kind of Deanna-Troi-ooh-I’m just-so-sensuous-that-I can’t help-shuddering-with-pleasure-as-this-ice-cream-melts-on-my-tongue type of way.

Because that’s just supremely vexing and entirely deserving of a withering eye-roll.

Enough stalling. Allow me to come to the point.

Have you heard of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR)?

I heard about it from He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved a couple of years ago. It was suddenly in the media for some reason, with particular attention being given to YouTube videos featuring people whispering and opening packages—both activities that supposedly trigger ASMR in people who claim to experience it.

“Hey, I think this might be that thing that you have!” he said.

I remember coming over and looking at the YouTube video of a woman whispering and another of someone going through her grandmother’s jewelry collection.

“Does watching this give you that feeling you get?” he asked.

“No way!” I replied. “This is totally bizarre. Getting pleasurable tingling sensations from listening to people whispering or watching someone go through a jewelry collection? What a bunch of weirdos!”

No, the sensation I get to which He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved was referring is quite different and is not induced by the same kinds of stimuli.

First of all, it’s not a tingling so much as a feeling of very deep relaxation like sinking into a hot tub, and it is stimulated by the following:

• Going through an automated “tunnel” car wash
• Watching someone use an electric razor
• Sitting in a room where someone is vacuuming

I also get some version of the same feeling, although not quite the same, from:

• Reclining in a dentist’s chair and overhearing the hum of the various instruments in the background
• Watching a planetarium show
• Watching from inside a room or car as someone manually cleans the windows with a squeegee.

I’ve actually never thought much until writing this post about what all these experiences have in common. But I suppose they’re not really so different from each other: what they share is that I, the subject, am comfortably at rest while the space around is suffused with a particular sort of constant, buzzy, ambient noise and, also, some kind of visual representation of an area of space being methodically cleared of some accumulated substance (dust; suds; stubble). In fact, now that I think about it, I recall, as a child, having the same feeling on frosty mornings when my Mum would use the frost scraper she kept in the glove compartment to steadily scrape away the thin film of ice from the windows while I was sitting inside the car.

The reason I started thinking about this phenomenon is because we went to the planetarium at Griffith Park Observatory at the weekend; I haven’t been to the planetarium since I was a child, but as soon as the idea was proposed I remembered that it was also one of the activities that elicits this sensation. Watching a planetarium show seems like the most straight-forwardly pleasurable of the activities described above. More puzzling is why the other, distinctly quotidian activities would induce this feeling of deep relaxation.

I have three theories, one vaguely evolutionary one, one more sociological-psychological one, and then, lastly, the one that I think is probably the most plausible.

Theory #1

Several articles about ASMR in the popular media included interviews with David Huron, a professor who studies music cognition at Ohio State. He was skeptical that ASMR was a distinct phenomenon distinct from other kinds of pleasure derived from aural stimuli; however, he did note (and discusses it here) that some kinds of auditory pleasure might be a form of surrogate “grooming.” The idea is that non-human primates spend an inordinate amount of time grooming each other, and that many human pleasures can be understood as surrogate forms of grooming: expressions of care that strengthen social bonds.

Now, this makes sense to me because a lot of the experiences that produce the relaxing feeling in me are, it strikes me, forms of surrogate grooming; something is been cleaned on my behalf; my immediate environment is being “groomed.” Also, I find being physically “groomed” incredibly relaxing. I used to think that this was a universal response; and, indeed, I think it is fairly common: if you remember taking enormous pleasure in having your hair checked for lice when you were a child, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. I love getting my hair cut and always want the stylist to tarry as long as possible simply because the sensation of someone playing with my hair is so delightful.

OK, so that’s the vaguely evolutionary explanation.

Theory #2

A lot of the activities that elicit this response in me are very firmly associated with childhood and with being taken care of. Moreover, they smack unmistakably of a privileged Western twentieth-century-late-capitalist childhood: electric razors! Automated car-washes! Vacuum cleaners! I’m actually ashamed to admit this because it so clearly marks me as the bourgeois scum that I surely am, but I only discovered the vacuum cleaner thing when I was at university. It was characteristic of the nannying of undergraduates at Cambridge that every day a cleaning woman would come in to empty the bin in your dorm room. She would knock and if you didn’t reply she would just open the door with her master key and empty your bin. And, likewise, once a week, she would come in and vacuum your room. Sometimes I would be sitting at my desk working when she came in and that’s when I discovered that the sensation of someone vacuuming around me was bizarrely relaxing, again in the submerging-into-a-hot-tub sense. [2]

That one’s pretty perverse, I know; it sounds a bit Martin Amis, doesn’t it? Except, that, obviously, it would be so much worse in his version.

Theory #3

This one’s for you, Paul.

So …. A lot of the activities that elicit this response involve sitting in some kind of reclining position while someone else at a slight distance from me is using some kind of electric instrument.

When I put it like that, I think the answer’s perfectly obvious, isn’t it?

I was abducted by aliens when I was a child and, while the aliens naturally used some kind of sophisticated memory-erasing device to eliminate the experience from my conscious mind, I still possess the residual memory of how they gave me this special relaxing alien drug and then let me sit in a special alien reclining chair so they could observe my vital signs while at the same time they pottered around using all of their special alien technological instruments to steer the ship and stuff.

Right? Doesn’t everything just fall into place now? And that’s why the planetarium show also induces the response! Because it reminds me of looking out the spaceship’s window as we hurtled through space!

So there you have it.

What do you think? Does one explanation strike you as more plausible than the others? Also … do you have some version of this? Or is it just me? And what do you think we should call it? Autonomous-sensory-lazy-cow-enjoys-watching-you-clean-stuff-up-while-she-sits-on-her-arse-response?

ASLCEWYCSUWSSOHAR

Oh, finally, I’ll note here, in case you’re wondering: there are enough other readily available pleasures in life that I don’t seek out any of these; just every now and then they come along and I think, oh, yeah! That thing!

And, in any case, I know that, one day, I’ll be able to experience it all the time when the aliens come back for me.

Notes

[1] No, I do not mean you. Or you. Or you. I don’t have any particular person in mind so much as a character. Also, no, I don’t mind if you are actually a tactile person. I like being hugged! I’m happy when you reach inside the back of my shirt and tuck in my label for me! It’s all good! It’s just this particular self-presentation to which I object.

[2] When I first described the vacuuming relaxation-response to He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved he asked, dryly, “and you’re quite sure that it only occurs when someone else is vacuuming?” Relevant here is also the fact that we own a Roomba, which, unfortunately, does not elicit the same response.

I’m pleased to announce that, based on your submissions, I can declare myself the unequivocal winner of my argument with Dr. F. I will inform her of this result when we meet tomorrow at 9 am. For those of you who missed the discussion (where were you?), the question at stake was whether or not, as I controversially asserted, a woman’s attractiveness to men can be said to diminish with age.

Of the readers who took part in the survey who had an opposite-sex partner, in 1 case the woman was older, and in the 5 other cases the man was older. Moreover, while the difference in age within most couples was only a year or so, there were a couple of female-male couples in which the man was 5 or 6 years older than the woman.

So, I now have evidence to back up my startling claim that men, in general, prefer slightly younger women, and that aging therefore disadvantages women interested in men. It does also seem significant to the duck-rabbit that the only female reader who took part in the survey whose partner is younger, and, I will say, significantly younger, is a woman partnered with another woman.

Interesting.

Speaking of which, I thought you might also find of interest some demographic data on my readers that I’ve put together based entirely on the information provided by the highly representative sampling of readers who took part in my survey.

• Percentage of readers who are women: 86
• Percentage of readers who are academics: 57
• Percentage of readers who are academics partnered with other academics: 25
• Percentage of readers who left academia to pursue other endeavors: 29
• Percentage of readers whose partner works in the film industry: 29
• Percentage of readers whose partner works in the film industry who live in Los Angeles: 0
• Percentage of readers who live in England: 43
• Percentage of readers who are English: 29
• Percentage of readers who live much too far away: 71
• Percentage of readers who went to Harvard: 71
• Of readers who attended Harvard, percentage who lived with the duck-rabbit while they were there: 50
• Of those readers who lived with the duck-rabbit, percentage who are still friends with it: 100
• Percentage of readers who learned to drive from the same driving instructor as the duck-rabbit: 14
• Percentage of readers who have driven the duck-rabbit somewhere: 100
• Percentage of readers whom the duck-rabbit has driven somewhere: 0
• Percentage of readers who are listed in the duck-rabbit’s book’s Acknowledgements: 100
• Percentage of readers listed in the duck-rabbit’s book’s Acknowledgements whose names are spelled correctly: 100. Ahem.
• Percentage of readers who have interviewed the duck-rabbit for an academic job: 14
• Percentage of readers with whom the duck-rabbit has studied for an exam: 29
• Percentage of readers with whom the duck-rabbit has exchanged hilarious notes during a class: 29
• Percentage of readers who sign their emails to me with xxxxs: 43
• Percentage of readers who modeled for me when I was practicing life drawing: 14
• Percentage of readers for whom I have served as a life drawing model: 14
• Percentage of readers who have baked me a cake: 43
• Percentage of readers whom I’ve heard use the word “Pshaw!” non-ironically as an exclamation: 14
• Percentage of readers with whom I’ve shared a changing room while trying on clothes: 57
• Percentage of readers whom I called the day after my Dad died: 14
• Percentage of readers whom I texted while my water was breaking: 14
• Percentage of readers who’ve seen me cry: 57
• Percentage of readers who’ve seen me wearing a sari: 29
• Percentage of readers with whom I’ve danced: 71
• Percentage of readers with whom I’ve jetéd, ineptly, across the floor: 14
• Percentage of readers with whom I’ve watched Indonesian dance: 29
• Percentage of readers with whom I’ve eaten gingersnap-molasses ice-cream while watching Clueless: 14
• Percentage of readers to whom I’ve declared, “I love you,” in writing: 43
• Percentage of readers to whom I’ve declared, “I love you,” in writing who are the same readers who have baked me a cake: not as big as you might think.
• Percentage of readers with whom I’ve agreed to live when everyone else we know has died: 14
• Percentage of readers named after a character in a Thomas Hardy novel: 14
• Percentage of readers for whose friendship I am deeply grateful: 100

Have no doubt that I will update you, dear readers, on the outcome of my poll when all the results have been tallied.

In the meantime, I’ve found myself thinking about the category of minor talents and incompetencies, that is to say, those abilities and inabilities that are generally unsung or unlamented, or perhaps not even acknowledged as such.

Allow me to provide an example.

I have two minor talents.

The first I get to exercise on an almost daily basis; the second I only have a chance to show off when we’re at the beach.

I’ll begin with the second, since it was the experience of using this particular talent yesterday at the beach in Encinitas that made me think that it belonged in the category of minor talents; moreover, it was while performing this activity that it struck me (a minor epiphany? A miniphany?) that there was a category of minor talents.

My second minor talent (chronologically speaking, it is the first, since it was perfected in childhood) is making perfect circles in the sand.

I do this by standing in the sand (semi-wet sand is necessary for this exercise) and then perform a Rond de jambe à terre en dehors with my left foot, my left toe tracing a semi-circle in the sand. I then perform a Rond de jambe à terre en dedans with my right foot, and as long as my right leg is perfectly straight and my toe is perfectly pointed, the semi-circle inscribed with my right toe will line up exactly with the semi-circle made by my left toe, and I will be left standing inside a perfect circle in the sand. In performing this exercise, you essentially become a human pair of compasses.

It is a very pleasing thing to do.

As a girl, whenever we were at a sandy beach, I would make circle upon circle upon circle.

Yesterday when we went to the beach it was low tide and there was a satisfyingly large expanse of damp sand. I made circle after circle, some adjacent to each other, some overlapping. The elder flopsy-duckit ran over. Although he’d seen me do it before he was nonetheless impressed.

“How’d you make such perfect circles?” he asked. He tried to copy, tracing a wobbly half circle and then stumbling over.

His friend ran over. “Wow, how’d you make such perfect circles?” he asked.

I showed him, explaining, “This is why you need to take ballet!”

But then I laughed and observed, “although I suppose that it’s not a particularly useful skill to be able to make perfect circles in the sand.”

“Yeah,” said the elder’s friend, whom I’ve known since he was 18 months old, “But it’s so cool.”

Minor talent number two is less cool but unquestionably more useful. This talent is for slicing bread.

Don’t scoff: in these days of ready-sliced bread it’s a rare talent, I maintain, to be able to consistently slice nice even slices of bread. Sure, perhaps you can manage one decent slice, but most people, if they’re trying to slice a whole loaf, will produce all of these great lunking doorstop slices and then these little pathetic fragments where they vainly attempted to cut a delicate slice but angled the knife too sharply away from the loaf yielding only a sad, raggedy piece.

I, on the other hand, can cheerfully cut a whole loaf into lovely slices. I can do thinner slices for sandwiches, and thicker pieces for toast. I’ve got all your bread-slicing needs covered.

Now, I know what you’re thinking at this point. You’re thinking, just who the hell does this duck-rabbit think it is, blowing its own trumpet in this gauche fashion (although, you must admit, that the sound emitting from my trumpet is a decidedly modest little toot)?

Fair enough. I will now proceed to enumerate two minor incompetencies as a counter-balance to the previously articulated minor talents.

Incompetency Number 1: the inability to put on a bra like a grown woman. [1]

There is a manner in which most grown women put on a bra: they put their arms through the straps and then they reach behind them to fasten the hook-and-eye closure between their shoulder-blades.

This is not how I put on a bra. I put on a bra by fastening it around my waist, back to front, and then twisting it around and tugging it up before finally pulling up the straps over my shoulders.

This is the way a 12 year-old girl puts on a bra.

I have and tried and tried since I started wearing a bra to fasten it like a grown woman. But I cannot. I just cannot. Every now and then, I will give it another go, just to see if, somehow, my ability to fasten things that I cannot see has improved in the intervening years. But it always ends with a stream of expletives and the resumption, sullenly and resignedly, of my original method.

If I am in a public changing room at a swimming pool or in one of the communal changing rooms that is sometimes found in British women’s clothing stores, I will often perform a charade of attempting to put it on in the grown-up womanly fashion. And then, as I fail to accomplish the task I will make a face that is meant to express, this is so weird, I can always usually do this, obviously, because I am a grown woman, but I guess this one time because, I don’t know, perhaps my bra shrunk in the wash or one of the hooks at the back is twisted or something like that, I’m going to have to do my bra up in the babyish way.

That is how embarrassed I am that I cannot do my bra up: I am embarrassed enough that I go through an elaborate performance for the benefit of other women so that they don’t, I don’t know, nudge each other and say, “do you see that forty-year old woman just put on her bra like a twelve-year old?”

Incompetency Number 2: the inability to swipe things.

“Things” here refers to items including credit cards; the ID card that I have to swipe when I get on the bus in L.A., or, and most especially, any kind of ticket that has to be inserted into, or, possibly, scanned above, a turnstile (most obviously in a public transportation system such as an overground or underground rail system).

I am the person who holds up the line whether it’s in the supermarket, at the bus stop, or in the subway station, because of my incompetent swiping. I quite often find myself beginning to sweat if I’m using an unfamiliar public transport system in anticipation that I am going to bollocks-up the passage through the turnstile.

I get particularly anxious if there is a prospect of being caught in the jaws of some kind of electronic gate that threatens to snap you in its grip if you fail to scuttle through the turnstile quickly enough. Naturally, this anxiety compounds my incompetency and therefore I quite often get stuck and separated from any fellow travelers who will then shout and gesticulate meaninglessly from the other side as I frantically attempt to insert the ticket into the turnstile’s every conceivable orifice or wave it in front of any part of it that looks like it might plausibly have scanning abilities.

So, there you have it: my two minor talents and two of my minor incompetencies (I must admit that the number of minor incompetencies is far greater than two. And we needn’t get into the major incompetencies).

What are your minor talents and incompetencies? I’d love to know!

Notes

[1] No need to avert your eyes, bashful readers! You may rest assured that there is nothing titillating about this confession; moreover, I suspect that whatever modicum of interest this tale holds will extend only to those readers who have direct experience of wearing a brassiere.

Day 50 already? I don’t feel a day over 49.

Today I bring you a different sort of post: it’s a survey, really, one suggested by Dr. F, her idea being that I might use my blog to poll my readers, with the aim of resolving a dispute we had during this morning’s session.

I think you’ll find that it’s a particularly apt poll to be conducting on this St. Valentine’s Eve, Friday the 13^th. Unlucky for some.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First I want to mention that this is not the first dispute of this nature that I have had with Dr. F. We quite often have these minor conflicts in which I say something that I take to be self-evident and intuitive, which she then treats, on the contrary, as eccentric and peculiar. The effect is sometimes to make me feel as though she is a benevolent alien, one who is curious about the ways of Earthlings but also deeply perplexed by their behavior.

For example, a while ago we had a conversation in which I was telling her how I often turn to other people if I’m feeling depressed. It went something like this (I may have taken a little poetic license at the end).

D-R: Yeah, so I guess I talk to my family or close friends when I’m feeling depressed.

Dr. F: And why do you do that?

D-R: [Caught off-guard by the question] Why? Uh, well, umm, I suppose it just makes me feel better to talk to someone about it?

Dr. F: Does it make you feel better?

D-R: Uhh … yes … usually.

Dr. F: And why do you think that is?

D-R: [Exasperated] I dunno … sometimes it just helps to talk to someone when you’re having a hard time, you know?

Dr. F: [With a puzzled expression on her face] Does it?

D-R: [More exasperated]: You’re making me feel like confiding in my friends is some weird aberrant behavior. I mean, don’t you ever confide in your friends?

Dr. F: What is this “confiding,” you speak of, Earthling?

D-R: Well, it’s to tell someone you trust something, probably something intimate, perhaps something that you’re worried about …

Dr. F: And this “confiding,” is it common among Earthlings?

D-R: Well, I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure … maybe I just took “Bridge Over Troubled Water” too metaphorically [trailing off] …

Sometimes I feel that psychotherapy’s premises invert the principle of Occam’s razor, in that psychotherapy assumes that the simplest explanation (e.g.: I talk to my friends because it gives me comfort to do so) is also the least likely. Instead, psychotherapy employs a principle that I’ll call Freud’s pomade. Instead of opting for the simplest explanation, shorn of all unnecessary postulates, the psychotherapist opts for the luxuriantly ample explanation, the pomade making each tendril glossily visible. So, for example, I actually confide in my friends, the psychotherapist muses, stroking his well-pomaded-beard, because I’m still seething over this argument I had with my father when I was eleven, and confiding in my friends is my way of proving him wrong. I’m not snidely implying here, by the way, that psychotherapy is misguided to assume that the simple explanation is wrong. Occam’s razor has always struck me as a ridiculous principle.

But let me get to the subject of today’s dispute. I made an offhand observation that I did not imagine to be controversial. Dr. F. reacted with shocked surprise.

My offhand remark was that my attractiveness will diminish as I age.

I did not say this with the remotest intention of disparaging myself—or women older than I am—in any way; it was a matter-of-fact statement and I was careful in choosing the word, “attractiveness.” I know countless beautiful women over 40. But by “attractiveness” I did not mean beauty or cleverness or wit; attractiveness is the quality of attracting attention from others. Attractiveness is, by its very definition, other-directed. So, all I meant is that it seems reasonable to assume, given the society we live in, that a person, especially a woman, will become less attractive, especially to men, as she ages.

The youthful, beautiful Dr. F incredulously asked me for evidence that this was true.

Honestly, I didn’t feel that I needed evidence; this was, once again, one of those situations where I felt like she was saying, “so in your world, Earthling, women are valued for their youthfulness?” [1]

But she persisted and in fact she said, why don’t you use your blog to canvas your readers?

I said that I could just do some research on the internet, but she specifically wanted me to find evidence that among my peers and acquaintances this holds true.

Well, I decided to indulge her, but I also couldn’t resist seeing what more general data came up. So, I found this, for example, on Nate Silver’s website fivethirtyeight.com

It’s just a bunch of statistics from the dating site OKCupid, but here’s the upshot:

on average, until a woman turns 50, the men she will find most attractive will be around her own age; when she turns 50, she will, on average, begin to find men about 5 years younger most attractive.

Until a man turns 50 (and, presumably, afterwards too) the women he will find most attractive will be 21. The end. Period.

So here’s where Dr. F would chime in and say that just because there is this gulf between heterosexual women and heterosexual men on OKCupid, it doesn’t mean that my community of peers reflects that same trend.

And, she has a point, because my readers belong to a very exclusive (what are there, 26 of you?) demographic, a terribly sophisticated, enlightened, and, yes, feminist demographic, one that cuts across regions and even nations. Tell me if I’m right:

1) You listen to NPR or Radio 4

2) You read The New York Times or The Guardian, probably online

3) You have eaten kale some time in the last week

4) You have heard of Simone de Beauvoir. You may even have read something by her.

5) You have traveled outside the country you were born in

Am I 5 for 5?

The point is that this enlightened group of readers may not reflect the cultural biases of the culture at large. That is, in fact, what I want to discover. My hypothesis is that, on average, if you, dear reader, are a man with a female partner (or a man whose most recent partner was female), then she will be (or will have been) younger than you; and if you are a woman with a male partner (or a woman whose most recent partner was male), then he will be (or will have been) older than you. If you are woman partnered with a woman or a man partnered with a man then the general statistics suggest that the age range between you and your partner will, on average, grow larger as you age (no time travel necessary).

What will this survey prove? Well, obviously it will prove nothing at all scientifically because it’s not a scientific experiment. But I suspect it will persuade me that in my peer-group, heterosexual men more often pair off with women younger than themselves, and that, therefore, it is simply a statement of fact for a woman in that peer group to observe that she becomes less attractive as she ages because, inevitably, the pool of men who will be attracted to her shrinks.

So, will you help Dr F and me to resolve our dispute?

If you’re willing, in the comments section, please write your sex, age, and what you do for a living; and please provide the same information for your partner (whether current or most recent). [2]

For example: 85, female, neuroscientist & 21, male, layabout.

Remember that you can always use a pseudonym if you don’t want your real name to appear on the site. Also: although this site is not completely private, it isn’t generally indexed by search engines. Alternatively, you can just email me. Alternatively, you can completely ignore this request and I will still think that you (yes, you) are the BEST of all my readers.

Feel free to poll others as well as or instead of providing your own details. But don’t lie in order to mess with me! I am genuinely curious and, also, I really want to win my argument with Dr. F.

Oh, and P.S. This is not about me feeling insecure about my appearance! I felt like that when I was a teenager but I think I look PERFECTLY FINE now.

Notes

[1] Here, also, I should note that I’m not snidely implying that Dr. F’s baffled-alien posture is misguided. If it’s part of the point of psychotherapy to cultivate an awareness of your most deeply ingrained behavioral patterns, then imagining that you’re explaining them to an alien is quite helpful, actually.

[2] Why do I want to know your profession? Because Dr. F. speculates that academics are anomalous; she essentially thinks that my point of view has been irrevocably distorted by spending my life around other academics. And, let’s face it, she’s probably right about that.

When I opened the door this morning to shoo the elder off to school, I saw our neighbor, who lives in the unit opposite ours, coming out of her house at the same time. She divides her time between L.A. and New York, so I don’t see her very often. We greeted each other warmly and started chatting, but I was also a little fidgety because I was aware that the elder was just standing there when he needed to be leaving NOW.

“Go on, go on!” I urged him. As he strode off, our neighbor turned to look at me with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. She mouthed the words, “YOU ARE CRAZY!!!!!” (And, yes, the manner in which she mouthed them indicated all-caps and several exclamation points).

I knew exactly what she was referring to. She was referring to the fact that I was still standing in the doorway, while the elder was walking to school.

“I know, I know ….” I mumbled, a little sheepishly, “but he’s fine, he’s been doing it for a while now.” Now she looked, if anything, more shocked.

“Oh. My. God,” she kept repeating.

This neighbor, you see, has a son exactly the same age as the elder (they are both nine). She mentioned that her son had informed her that the elder walks to school on his own and that she had told him in no uncertain terms that that could not possibly be true.

“YOU ARE CRAZY,” she said again, in case I had failed to divine the words on her lips the first time. “My friend’s daughter was nearly abducted in Whole Foods!”

I didn’t really know what to say to this (although I did, I admit, puzzle over what it means to be “nearly abducted”) [1] so I didn’t say anything. I think my expression may have read as, “Eh … you win some, you lose some.” Upon registering my weary expression, my neighbor said, conciliatorily,

“I mean, I’m sure there’s stuff that I do that YOU would think is insane.”

What, me? I thought to myself? Think uncharitable, judgmental thoughts in the privacy of my own head about another person’s parenting decisions? Nope. That has definitely never, ever happened. Never. Definitely not.

I made a shoulder-shrugging gesture that was meant to convey something non-committal.

Later I was having lunch with a group of colleagues including one I’d never met before. It turned out she had an 8-year old son. The encounter from this morning still on my mind, I asked her if he walked to school by himself.

“Oh, I think that’s something from a previous generation!” she declared, laughing.

Although nobody at the table actually accused me of child-abuse when I confessed that my nine-year old walks to school on his own, much concern was expressed for his safety.

“How far does he have to walk?”

“Are there at least other Moms [i.e. good mothers] walking their kids to school while he’s walking?”

While the poor neglected elder was trudging the 0.3 miles to school this morning, lashed by the wind and the rain, off to put in his 14 hours at t’ mill before coming home to a good thrashing, I skipped the younger to school in the sunshine. Today I taught her the song, “Skip to my Lou.” She asked if it was an English song about going to the loo. I said I didn’t think so but then realized I actually had no idea what the song was about. [2]

Is it fun being English? she asked.

While I was busy over-thinking the answer to that question [3] she chimed in,

“It’s not fun being American. I wish I was English. Then I could say baarrrfff.”

“You could say what?”

“Baarrrrffff.”

I was silent for another few seconds before it clicked: “oh, bath!”

Our talk turned from the lavatorial to the ethereal realm when the younger noticed that the moon was visible high above us in the chalk-blue sky.

“Can I be an astronaut when I grow up?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said.

We spent some time discussing how high you can jump on the moon, what astronauts eat in space, the importance of avoiding black holes, and other extra-terrestrial subjects.

Suddenly she stopped skipping and stood quite still on the sidewalk and looked at me.

“The earth is moving!” she exclaimed, her eyes dancing.

She didn’t mean there was an earthquake or anything like that; she meant that the earth was rotating even though we couldn’t feel it.

“We’re on earth!” she declared joyously, and she started to run, running her hands through the leaves of a passing hedge as she did so.

“On earth you can touch everything,” she yelled gleefully.

Oh, how I wish I could bottle that feeling: I’d distill it and make a tincture. I’d carry it around with me in a tiny flask, and take a wee dram, for medicinal purposes, as needed.

Notes

[1] I don’t mean to make light of what might have been a serious incident. Many years ago, before he was allowed to walk home from school, the elder wandered off after school instead of going to the after-school class that he was enrolled in. The school called me asking if I had already picked him up and I went into full panic mode. So, I understand anxiety about unattended children. But I’m also thinking of an incident that happened a couple of months ago in which I might have been unfairly pegged as a would-be-abductor. I was walking along the street in Westwood and saw a little girl, perhaps about 7 or 8, walking towards me, crying. I asked her if she was OK and, understandably, she gave me a frightened look that said, “you’re a stranger, there is no way I’m gonna talk to you.” She ignored my question and walked past me still crying; there was no adult within sight. So I went back and asked her, “are you sure you’re all right? Do you need help?” “I can’t find my Mom and little sister,” she sobbed. I promised I would stay with her till we found her Mom, and she decided to trust me. We found her mother and sister in a few minutes once I had established where she had last seen them. The woman looked at me warily as I explained where I had found her daughter and I thought for a millisecond that she was going to accuse me of something. In the end she just said a curt thanks and I went on my way.

[2] Wikipedia claims that “Lou” derives from “‘loo,’ a Scottish word for love,” but I’m skeptical.

[3] The thoughts that flitted through my mind during that couple of seconds went something like, “English = Tea! Crumpets! Rufus Sewell, Middlemarch! Oh … but also: crippling class anxiety, devastating legacy of empire, oh bollocks.”

I was twenty minutes late for the “Time Management for Faculty Members Luncheon.”

It wasn’t my fault. You see, the lunch began at 12 and I taught until 12:15. Using what it turns out are extremely poor time management skills, I had arranged beforehand with my co-teacher that I would lecture until 12, leaving him the final 15 minutes to go over the essay assignment with the class. That way, since I had calculated that it would take me approximately 8 minutes to walk over to the faculty center from the room in which I lecture, I wouldn’t be more than 10 minutes late. And, as my co-teacher observed, they always spend the first 10 minutes of these things bringing out the salads and bread rolls so, really, it was extremely efficient on my part to skip the first ten minutes.

I was confident that I would finish on time because the second half of the lecture was on Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, “The Deserted Village,” a poem, which, I learned this week (I had never read it before this week), I actively dislike. I was sure that I didn’t have more than twenty minutes worth of stuff to say about it. But, as sometimes happens, I found that my dislike of the poem actually seemed to inspire me. I found myself talking at some length about agricultural enclosure. And a lot of other things that only took up one line in my notes took a longer-than-anticipated time to explain. For example, when I used the word “pastoral” and got a lot of blank stares (and it wasn’t just my accent) I went down a pastoral rabbit-hole (sheep-hole?) about shepherds and swains and wolves in sheep’s clothing and what a pastoral elegy is and how an elegy differs from a eulogy.

I also read out loud this part about how all the poor dispossessed swains have to go to ghastly America where everything is TERRIFYING, just because I thought it was really funny:

“Far different there from all that charm’d before,

The various terrors of that horrid shore;

Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray,

And fiercely shed intolerable day;

Those matted woods where birds forget to sing,

But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling;

Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned,

Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;

Where at each step the stranger fears to wake

The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, [1]

And savage men, more murderous still than they;

While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies,

Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies.

Far different these from every former scene,

The cooling brook, the grassy vested green,

The breezy covert of the warbling grove,

That only shelter’d thefts of harmless love.”

The point is, I didn’t leave the lecture room until 12:10. I arrived at the faculty center in a sweat. Walking hastily towards the meeting room, I encountered a group of ladies sitting behind a table covered with name-tags. I started looking for my name. One woman regarded me suspiciously.

“This is for the time-management luncheon. Are you here for that?”

“Yes,” I replied breathlessly, “I know I’m late. This is precisely why I need to be there.”

The woman chuckled. “She just began,” she said.

I opened the closed door as quietly as I could and peeked in. I have been to quite a few of these luncheons sponsored by my institution’s faculty development program, and this was by far the most packed event I’ve ever attended. This was not surprising. The full title of the presentation was “Time Management for Faculty Members: How to Manage Your Time so You can Publish Prolifically AND have a Life Beyond the Ivory Tower.” It felt to me that it would be hubris not to attend a talk with that title. If there ever was a title to appeal to those who favor both … and over either/or, this was it. If this were a fairytale, it would have been called Time Management for Heroines: How to Marry the Prince so You Can Achieve Upward Mobility AND Have a Life Beyond the Castle Tower.

The secret to discovering my prolifically-publishing-tower-busting true self awaited me, and it was to be divulged over dry chicken breast and a medley of vegetables, if only I could make it to the one empty seat in the middle of the room!

The door was at the front of the room next to the podium. The speaker, standing at the podium, had evidently just launched into a PowerPoint presentation. Everyone else had finished their salads and was turned towards the speaker, listening attentively. I was, evidently, the last person to arrive, a fact that, honestly, made me question the integrity of everybody else in that room. How could it possibly be the case that the 100 or so other attendees of a time-management seminar had managed to get there on time? What a bunch of fakers.

Although it was my plan to sneak into the room and settle into my seat unobtrusively, it was one of those situations in which my entrance into the room was so obvious that the speaker actually paused during her presentation, looked over to me and said, brightly, “Welcome, welcome!” so that everyone in the room could be sure to witness my grand entrance. For some reason, I instinctively did an elaborate mime of tiptoeing over to the one empty seat, a mime that was redundant both because I had already disrupted the proceedings and because the floor was carpeted, rendering tiptoeing completely unnecessary.

I finally slipped into my seat and spent the next ten minutes trying to figure out how to attach my name tag to my jacket.

Good Lord.

What, you may ask, did I learn, ultimately, at this hotly-anticipated luncheon?

I’d tell you, really I would, but unfortunately I’ve run out of time.

Notes

[1] This note is for my American readers only: firstly, OH MY GOD, WHY DID NO-ONE TELL ME ABOUT THE TIGERS??? Secondly, what else are you hiding from me?

The first time I saw a psychiatrist was nearly two years ago. I’d been in therapy before but I’d never seen a psychiatrist. [1] I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t think that I needed any medication. I was just dogged by a persistent sense that something had shifted, something wasn’t right, and the feeling wouldn’t go away.

There were only a couple of other people in the waiting room. One rocked back and forth muttering to himself, spitting out expletives. The other, in distress, explained loudly and confusedly to the receptionist that she had thought she had an appointment but that now she wasn’t sure. The receptionist patiently reassured her and called her doctor from the front desk.

“I am clearly in the wrong place,” I thought to myself. “I’m not like these people! I’m having an existential mid-life crisis! I’m not mentally ill!” I was eager to draw a sharp distinction between me and them. I’m reminded of a conversation at a conference lunch long enough ago that it concerned the spectacle of seeing people strolling around talking on their Bluetooth headsets. One person quipped, “now you can’t tell who’s crazy any more!” There was a pause, and then someone else in the group gave him a hard, curious stare and asked, “you thought you could tell before?” Her point was that, as the Cheshire cat famously puts it, “we’re all mad here.”

If anything, my initial visit to this psychiatrist reassured me that, even if we are all mad, I could nonetheless take a certain smug self-satisfaction in the rarefied quality of my madness. The psychiatrist I saw that day wasn’t taking any new patients, so, after we’d talked for about ten minutes, she gave me a list of other therapists along with the following advice: don’t plump for the first person who has an available appointment, she urged; rather, I should wait until I met someone with whom I had a good rapport. “You’re very high functioning,” she observed casually, “you’re articulate, you’re a dream patient, so you can afford to be choosy.”

There’s nothing I like better than getting an A+, so I remember feeling rather puffed up upon hearing this. I’m very high functioning, don’t you know. Surely I can put that somewhere on my c.v. It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment, though. When I do a Google search for the phrase “high functioning,” it appears in front of the following words, in this order: alcoholism; autism; sociopath.

Moreover, recently it’s occurred to me that I’m not a dream patient so much as a psychiatrist’s nightmare. Consider the various crosses that the long-suffering Dr. F must bear. In the first place, I have turned her into a character on my blog. [2] In the second place, I email her whenever I feel like it because she agreed that I could as long as I understood that she would not respond to any of my missives except to acknowledge receipt. Except that she often does reply, seemingly against her better judgment. In our session last week, she mused, with genuine puzzlement, upon why she does reply to my emails. “You’re very convincing,” she finally declared, by way of explanation. [3]

On the plus side for Dr. F, I’m also dead easy to interpret. While I’d like to imagine that my unconscious is mysterious and inscrutable, in fact it is embarrassingly heavy-handed. For example, when I’m worried about something at work, I’ll typically dream some variation upon being at a faculty meeting and suddenly realizing that I’m naked from the waist up. Uh-oh, my dream-self will think to itself. Just sit very still and don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself and no-one will notice, I’ll counsel myself.

Or, consider the following dream, which I had a couple of nights ago.

I dreamed I was an astronaut. I was wearing a space suit and was floating in space. The cable connecting me to my spaceship had somehow become untethered. I was tumbling, drifting, deeper and deeper into space. I understood that rescue was not possible and I realized that I would die in space. Immediately a feeling of panic engulfed me, but then I reasoned with myself that everyone has to die, everyone dies alone, ultimately, and so what difference would it make where I died? But this thought didn’t give me any comfort; instead, as I tumbled further and further into space I grew distraught at the idea that after I died my body would shrivel in its suit and that I would tumble through space forever, never coming to rest.

Is that not, possibly, the least cryptic dream you’ve ever heard? And yet, I related it to Dr. F without the least sense that it might have any symbolic resonance at all but much more in the spirit of, “hey, you’ll never guess the crazy dream about outer space that I had last night!”

Dr. F did not see it as a random space odyssey fantasy. Indeed, as I was relating this dream to Dr. F, her expression grew animated. Her eyes lit up. This is not because she took some perverse pleasure in my ridiculously bleak dream but rather because, in the light of a conversation that I had just related to her, my dream seemed blatantly suggestive in a manner to which I was comically oblivious.

“So … that dream seems … symbolic,” she ventured, gently.

“Does it?” I asked, genuinely baffled as to what she could possibly mean.

Dr. F stared at me incredulously.

“Drifting,” she repeated. “You’re drifting because the cord—almost like an umbilical cord—has been severed. The dream embodies your fear that you will always be alone,” she concluded.

By contrast to my own hunch that this was a dream about the Mars One project, Dr. F’s interpretation seemed, by contrast, so blindingly obvious that I actually started laughing out loud at my own obtuseness. It was as if I’d expressed shocked surprise at the very idea that the Cambridge University Library might be considered a phallic symbol. [1]

Emboldened, Dr. F added, helpfully, “The part about shriveling, that’s about your fear that you’ll grow old and wrinkled all on your own.”

“Jesus,” I said, wincing. “Well, now I’m depressed.”

In case the same gloomy thought is now passing through your minds, dear readers, let me leave you, this Sunday evening, with an uplifting thought: perhaps tonight I’ll dream the sequel, in which, in an unforeseen twist, George Clooney’s ghost will guide me back to earth. Or something like that. That could totally happen. Right, George?

Notes

[1] The Cambridge University Library’s phallic symbolism was something we observed often as undergrads (we were English majors in the early 90s, after all!). Its identification as such was further encouraged by the persistent rumor (which no one I knew could actually confirm) that the tower housed the university’s porn collection.

[1] As the daughter of an analytically trained psychotherapist, I have an inherited bias against psychiatrists. However, as the daughter of an analytically trained psychotherapist, I also have a bias against analytically trained psychotherapists. Analyze that!

[2] Yes, Dr. F. reads my blog. (Dr. S doesn’t, so far as I know, which is probably a good thing.) Dr. F is now, to an extent that I feel slightly guilty about, highly self-conscious about her use of exclamation points. We have had some extensive conversations about punctuation since I wrote that post.

[3] I get this a lot, this “you’re very convincing” line, and, because I’m bloody-minded I’ve decided that it’s really an insult. I mean, let’s think about the kind of people you might describe as very convincing. Satan, for one. (“Darling, I’m sorry, but he was just terribly convincing,” is probably what Eve actually said to Adam.). Lady Macbeth, for another. I rest my case.

He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved works for a software company that makes wearable gadgets that track your movement; its most obvious application is for people who want to know how many calories they’re burning when they exercise, that kind of thing. He was talking about it this morning and I misheard him (I hadn’t had any coffee yet); what I heard him say was that he was eager to finish this piece of software that would allow him to “detect all of my emotions,” but what he actually said was “detect all of my motions.”

That misheard phrase catapulted me into a speculative science-fictional duck-rabbit hole, partly, I think, because I had already been thinking about the mood organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. [1]

Here’s my imaginary gadget: it detects and reports your own emotions to you. Maybe you think you don’t need one of those, because, duh, you, like, already have one of those? It’s called a mind?

But wait just a minute before you cast my make-believe gadget into the imaginary dustbin of fictional inventions, o ye of little faith. Here’s the difference between your mind and my gadget. My gadget is external (let’s say it’s worn around the wrist, or, perhaps, hanging from the neck, like a pendant, resting upon your sternum; that would be a little visual joke about Momus’s glass) [2] and its data may be seen and read by anyone you care to show it to. So, say you’re sitting listening to someone tell you a long story and they break off and say, irritably and accusingly, “you’re not listening to a word I’m saying, you’re clearly bored out of your mind!” And say that in fact they are misreading your expression, you could then whip out your gadget, which might say, “Moderate to high levels of interest-excitement!!”[3] And you could say, “see, I was paying attention,” and whomever you were talking to would have no choice but to back the fuck down. [4]

Genius, right? [5]

So, how would this work, you ask?

Well, I’ve given this some thought, as is my wont, and I think it could work the same way as the software for measuring motion does. The first stage would be data collection. So, for example, perhaps you would hang around hospitals and measure all of the biometrics of people who have just been told that a close relative has died: voilà, you’ve captured grief. Then, while you were there, you could hop over to the maternity ward and measure the biometrics of mothers who had just given birth and were all flooded with endorphins. Joy: done. Or not done, actually, because you’d want to be able to account for all the different spectra of joy. So, on the way home from the hospital, you’d stop off and take the biometrics of all the preschoolers skipping home from school. [6]

So then you just program all that information into the wearable device and then it measures your individual physiological responses against those of all of the thousands or perhaps millions of data-suppliers and tells you how you are feeling. This would be useful in any situation in which the authenticity of your professed feelings was challenged. So, it would be similar to a lie-detector test but oh-so-much-more nuanced in the kinds of readings it would provide.

Conveniently, the younger flopsy-duckit supplied me this morning with a perfect example of how my gadget might be put to use in practice. She had just complained of a stomach-ache and I had suggested she have a glass of water. After she took one sip she declared, improbably, “It feels better now!”

“Good!” I said, giving her what I thought was a look that communicated the following: affection-amusement-skepticism-sympathy-love.

But then she frowned at me. “Why are you always making those sad faces?” she asked scornfully.

“I wasn’t making a sad face!” I protested.

“Yes you were!” she insisted.

Then she walked over to me (I was sitting on a chair in the living room) and stood right in front of me so that she was about an inch in front of my face, her eyes at my eye level. She stared hard.

“You can’t see your face,” she said. “Because your eyes are your face. So you don’t know.”

I was impressed and had to concede her point. “You’re right,” I said. “My eyes are in my face, so I can’t see my own face.” [7]

“But I can see your face,” she asserted.

And here is when I could have whipped out my gadget and shown her that, despite my facial expression, I was not actually sad. And that having been established, we would then have been in a position to conclude either that the younger is not very good at interpreting facial expressions, or that I am not very good at making facial expressions that reflect my feelings.

Clearly the younger was convinced of the latter, because she then started manipulating my mouth in an effort to coach me: she curled the corners of my mouth up, upon which she would exclaim “happy!” before turning the corners down and then exclaiming “sad!” She did this a number of times until I protested.

At this point you may be thinking to yourself, that’s all well and good, Duck-Rabbit, but the fact that this device might resolve a few quibbles surely doesn’t qualify it to be hailed as the greatest scientific invention of the 21^st century.

But think of the wider applications! It could resolve inter-generational and cross-cultural misunderstandings on a much bigger scale (“Arrogant? No, she’s just British!) We could cut prison populations (“Why he is genuinely remorseful, just like he said he was!”); we could solve world conflicts (“group x doesn’t hate group y; they’re terrified of them).

With that said, I will wait humbly for the call from the Nobel Committee.

Notes

[1] See my comment on Day 44.

[2] “If the fixture of Momus’s glass in the human breast, according to the proposed emendation of that arch-critick, had taken place,——first, This foolish consequence would certainly have followed,—That the very wisest and very gravest of us all, in one coin or other, must have paid window-money every day of our lives.

And, secondly, that had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look’d in,—view’d the soul stark naked;—observed all her motions,—her machinations;—traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth;—watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios …” (from Tristram Shandy Volume I, Chapter 23).

[3] Interest-excitement is one of the six basic affects identified by Silvan Tomkins in Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962-1991). I like the idea that the punctuation could also be a shorthand. So interest-excitement would be an exclamation point, and there would be fewer or more exclamation points depending on the level of interest-excitement registered.

[4] This could also be useful if you are trying to figure out if somebody is a philistine. Here is another version of the mood-tracker envisaged by the Director of the Center for the Future of Museums; she imagines a device that would be able to determine an individual’s level of “cultural engagement”: http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-biometrics-of-cultural-engagement.html  I for one am scared by this possibility because it would reveal that I am actually bored about 75% of the time in museums, my enjoyment soaring in the gift shop and the café. I always used to think, when I was living in London, that the cake you would get to eat in the café afterwards was the whole point of going to museums, but I must confess that I’m often disappointed by the cake-selection available at many museums in this country, e.g. the Getty, which clearly has enough money to have a much better selection of cakes than it offers.

[5] I have to explain here why I titled this post “The Greatest Scientific Invention of the 21^st Century.” It is in tribute to a question that I was once asked (by a highly-esteemed reader of this blog) in an interview for an academic job, an interview that I spectacularly bollocksed up. The question was “What do you regard as being one of the greatest scientific inventions of the eighteenth century?” This was a complete softball of a question given that at the time I was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and had boldly declared myself in my job letter to be a veritable expert on the intersections between eighteenth-century science and literature. However, my mind went completely blank and after some throat clearing I muttered (because I needed to buy more time) something vague about the eighteenth-century responding to seventeenth-century scientific discoveries. By this time, a few inventions had popped into my head but for every invention I thought of (the steam engine, gas street lights), my second thought was, but was that invented in the eighteenth century? Gah! Eventually, what I blurted out, without any explanation, was “F = ma.” That was all I said. I didn’t say anything else. My interviewees looked at me silently with expressions that I could not read. Later, I realized that, since Newton’s second law of motion is, uh, not generally referred to as an “invention,” they probably were completely nonplussed by my response. It all went downhill from there, but so kindly was the poser of the question that I strongly suspect that he was more distraught by my awkward response than I was.

[6] Or adults skipping! I skipped much of the way to preschool this morning with the younger F-D, and found that it’s really, really difficult to skip without having a silly grin on your face.

[7] I was reminded at this moment of the following sequence in Scott McCloud’s brilliant Understanding Comics:

I couldn’t find a good image of these pages on Google Images, so I just took a photo of these pages in my own copy.

“if a man knows only, and has only knowledge of knowledge, and has no further knowledge of health and justice, the probability is that he will only know that he knows something.”

Plato, Charmides

Over the weekend, the younger flopsy-duckit forgot how to skip.

She is her mother’s daughter, in this respect; it is part of family lore that the duck-rabbit is the only person in human history who had to learn how to ride a bike twice because it forgot how after learning the first time.

The younger said she wanted to skip to preschool again, but then when we set off she lurched into a jog-gallop.

“Do you remember how to skip?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

So I demonstrated and she copied and soon she was skipping along energetically. Every now and then she would stop dramatically and say, “Oh! I need to catch my breath!” And then we would walk for a bit and talk.

We passed a palm tree.

The younger looked up. “If we were mouse,” the younger mused, “we could climb up that tree.”

“I suppose we could,” I said.

But then I paused and wondered aloud, “are mice good climbers?” I was really asking myself more than her. I imagined a mouse running up a tree. It seemed plausible. In the nursery rhyme the mouse has no problem running up a grandfather clock, which, after all, used to be a tree. But then, I couldn’t say for sure that I had ever actually witnessed a mouse running up a tree.

“Maybe it would be better if we were squirrels,” I suggested. Squirrels are really good at climbing trees.”

“Mouse are really good climbers,” affirmed the flopsy-duckit. “So are hamsters.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I responded, good-naturedly.

It was time to skip again.

A minute or two later it was time for another breather.

“Did you know,” said the younger, “that in the winter animals vibrate under where all the tree roots are?”

“They vibrate?” I repeated slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

She looked at me impatiently. “They go to sleep, under all the tree roots.”

“Oh,” I said. “I think you mean ‘hibernate.’ It’s called hibernating not vibrating.”

“No,” she replied instantly, without the least hesitation in her voice. “It’s definitely not hibernating. That’s not the right word. It’s called vibrating.”

“But what you mean is that they go to sleep for the winter, right?”

“Yes.”

“That is called hibernating.”

“No, it’s actually not.” [1]

“All right, then.”

It was time to skip again.

A minute later it was time for another breather.

We paused in front of someone’s front yard. There were roses and grasses and a large, volcanic-looking grey rock amidst them.

“Wow,” observed the younger in amazement, “look at that enormous pile of worm poo!”

I frowned. “Where?”

She pointed to the rock.

“That’s a rock,” I said, “there’s no way a worm could make that much poo.” [2]

She looked at me witheringly. “Not one worm, silly. Thousands of worms made it.”

“I am absolutely sure that that is not worm poo.”

“You’re wrong, you don’t know anything.”

“That is not true. I know things!”

“Yeah,” in a voice dripping with contempt, “eighteenth-century things. That’s the one thing you know.”

“That is not true,” I protested. “I mean, I know eighteenth-century things, but I also know other things.”

She looked at me skeptically. “Like what?”

I paused and considered. “I know how to skip.”

She couldn’t deny that. “All right,” she conceded. “Those are the two things you know.”

“No, I know other stuff too!”

“Like what?” she asked again.

I thought, racking my brain. I had given her leftover Trader Joe’s Macaroni & Cheese for her packed lunch today.

“I know how to make mac and cheese!” I declared triumphantly. [3]

She nodded. “OK.” She said. “Those are the three things you know.”

“Fine,” I said. “Those are the three things I know.”

I decided that perhaps, after all, that was enough.

Notes

[1] This may be the phrase that the younger uses more than any other phrase.

[2] On the walk back from preschool I actually went over to the rock and touched it, just to confirm that it was a rock. It was. It was a rock with presence. I started thinking of the rock in The Testament of Gideon Mack, “a stone, looming in the mist like a great tooth in a mouth full of smoke,” although that was a metamorphic rock, not an igneous rock (see, I was paying attention in Mr. Allen’s chemistry class when I wasn’t comforting forlorn students). I went back just now and took a picture, for your edification:

The enormous pile of worm poo, or rock, depending on whom you believe.

[3] I would like it to be known that I can also make macaroni cheese, as we call it in England, from scratch, without consulting a recipe, in imitation of the way my mother made it, but my children prefer the boxed kind, to my chagrin.