A Little, and a Long Way

OK—this is profoundly embarrassing. I am sitting in a café, which is where I spend a lot of my time. There are two reasons for the hours I spend here: the first is a need for people, since writing can be a solitary profession; the second is that I’m too lazy to make my own food.

I am therefore wasting huge sums of money, something that nobody but the shop owner could condone. And the worst thing? Though I am barely making enough money to keep afloat—as is Mr. Fernández—we are in the richest 4.0% of the world.

I know this because I went to a site called givingwhatwecan.org and entered a (probably too high) estimate of our combined incomes after taxes. And there, right on the page, was the button for “how rich am I?”

The sum I entered was 50,000 USD. OK, what happens when I put in 100,000 USD? “You are in the richest 0.15% of the world’s population,” was the answer. And 1,000,000 USD? Less that 0.1%.

The site is absolutely fascinating, as was the talk by the philosopher Peter Singer, which you can see below. I live perfectly well on $30,000 a year; I am 56; I am willing to donate 10% of my income; I will “retire” at age 65. OK, so I went to another page to see what effect I could have. And guess what? In the 9 years of giving, I would have saved 11 lives, I would have saved 491 years of healthy life, and I would have produced 9,000 years of school attendance.

But wait—suppose I retired at age 85? How would the world fare?

Total you would earn: 870,000 

Total you would donate: 87,000

Lives you could save: 35

Years of healthy life you could save: 1,582

Years of school attendance you'd produce: 29,000

That’s the graphic that popped up at me.

How is it possible? Singer has the explanation:

However, it is also possible to make extremely effective donations towards the world's poorest people. Because they have so little money, every dollar you give can make a tremendous difference — especially if spent on the world's most efficient aid programs. Read on to see just how much you could achieve and how little it would really cost you. 

 OK—so now you know what you’re worth, relative to the world population; as well, you know the effect of contributing whatever percent of your income you’ve chosen; now, where should your money go?

And it’s an important question, because the right charity can be a hundred times more effective than another, less effective one. So which charity gives you the biggest bang for the buck?

Here again, Singer sails through with the answer. He recommends four charities that are the most effective. Here are the four.

Against Malaria Foundation. Why? More than a million people die each year of malaria, 70% of them are kids under 5. A 3$ net can prevent the disease—and 100% of your money goes to the nets. Best of all, you can see where your nets are distributed.  Here’s the website: http://www.againstmalaria.com

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. The initiative aims to control and then eliminate the parasitical disease schistosomiasis, which afflicts more than 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Untreated, schistosomiasis leads to kidney, liver, and spleen damage; 76 cents will provide a dose of the drug needed to treat and cure. Here’s the website. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto

Deworm The World. 600 million kids around the world need to be dewormed; less than fifty cents is all it takes to treat one kid. This organization has treated 40 million children in 27 countries. Best, treating kids leads to significantly improved school attendance—a nice added benefit. Here’s the website.   http://www.dewormtheworld.org

Project Healthy Children. The project aims to confront malnutrition by food fortification, essentially supplying the vitamins that you and I take for granted. But a child goes blind every minute—80% of them because of vitamin deficiency. Zinc deficiency kills 800,000 children a year; Vitamin A deficiency kills 2.5 million children under age 5 every year. Here’s the website.  http://projecthealthychildren.org  

Singer came up with the idea of asking people to pledge 10% of their income until the day they retire. Here’s the pledge:

The Pledge to Give

I recognize that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries. I make this pledge freely, openly, and without regret.

As well, he came up with the idea of forming chapters of people who are working together to practice effective charity. So far, there are 10 chapters, 317 members, and $126,300,000 pledged.

OK—this is what I’m gonna do. Every day, I’m going to put my change into a piggy bank, which I will empty when full. I’ll take it to the bank, and get it changed; then, I’ll send a quarter of that amount to each one of the four charities.

Second strategy, I’ll play Bach suites once a week in the café where I am spending so profligately my money. I’ll put up a little sign announcing the charity of the week, and ask for donations.

Singer makes two further points—the materialist rat race of working to make money to spend money on stuff that doesn’t make us feel better but does mean we have to go back to work the next day is ridiculous. But oddly, giving money to a worthy cause does make us feel better. So shouldn’t we change trains?

Second, in terms of human impact, the money you donate may be the most important thing—by far—you’ll ever do in your life. 

Let Me Just Slip Into This Black Robe, Here

Well, the first thing that has to be said about Alain de Botton is that he’s phenomenally wise, profoundly insightful, unimaginably creative and wonderfully incisive.

I say all this, by the way, to avoid a repetition of the 2009 incident in which de Botton wrote, “I will hate you until the day I die,” to a New York Times critic, who had been less than kind about a book de Botton had written. 

In fact, I have liked all of the de Botton talks that I have seen on YouTube—he does have a razor-sharp mind, but who, graduating with a double-starred first from Caius College, Cambridge, wouldn’t?

There was the talk on atheism 2.0. The old version of atheism only established one thing: there is no god. OK—but what about the good things that religion brought us? A sense of community—there are times when a congregation carries a grief-stricken parishioner through dark times. Or what about morality? Yes, you can argue that a person shouldn’t need god to be moral; as well, many atheists are moral. But the church, ideally, was or is a constant, drumming force for reminding us to be living a moral life. And I liked what de Botton said about religion’s view on art: it is completely not art for art’s sake. It is strictly utilitarian; the purpose of art is to elicit emotion and teach lessons. That’s why you have that depiction of Christ on the cross, or the last supper, or Moses parting the Red Sea. It’s there for a reason.

I followed him through the lecture, “A kinder, gentler, philosophy of success.” Interesting, there, what he had to say about meritocracy, which he, in general, favors. Who couldn’t—it’s the belief that anyone, with enough work, can get what he deserves. That’s great in the case of Obama, but what about me? Iguanas has sold maybe six copies, so am I a dud? Do I deserve my failure?

De Botton says no—remember Mathew 24:13? “The race is not given to the swift nor the strong but he who endures to the end?” (Franny may be channeling me, or I her, but shouldn’t it be “him who endures?”) OK—that wasn’t actually his point, on rereading Mathew. De Botton thinks that despite all of our efforts, the playing field will never be entirely level. And he should know—his father was a seriously rich guy, though not, apparently, a terribly supportive one. My father was middle class but supportive—so who had the better deal? The thing is that in both cases it makes a difference, and neither he nor I had any say in the matter.

Then of course I had to listen to his talk about “How to think more about sex.” I mean, what guy wouldn’t? And that, finally, led me to Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Smile or Die; How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. I had liked the book, and could especially relate to it, since I had been through about 94 doses of quite concentrated positive thinking in my seven years at Wal-Mart. We had a monthly meeting, a regular feature of which was the motivational speaker. One particular speaker was a charming old lady who had to be lugged up to the stage because the cancer treatment was still affecting her but. not to worry, because the world was getting.., and here she broke into song…

Mejor, mejor, mejor!

Yes, her world was getting better, better, better—sing it, group! Sing it, everybody! Put your heart in your mouths and a smile on your face and beam your positive attitude into the radiant white light! Let’s hear it again!

We sang it again.

And even though it’s Monday, and it rained all weekend, and the housework never did get done—we’re alive, we’ve got jobs, we’ve got our families, and every day we can be sure that we are getting…

She put her ear to the microphone….

I loved all that stuff. Well, most of it. There was a day, in those months when I spent waiting for the ax to fall, when I came upon the in-house motivational speaker, Milton, filling up buckets of water before a Human Resources meeting. And no, he wasn’t the kind of guy who mops floors.

I could bear it no more; the meeting was mandatory and I skipped it.

Which may be why I’m not there.

Ehrenreich states that the main reason people are canned is because of their bad attitude, and asking skeptical questions about everybody’s great idea—hey, let’s give mortgages to people with lousy credit and then bundle ‘em up and sell ‘em off (sorry, the mortgages, not the people)—was a classic example of negativity. It’s not, of course; it’s a critical part of an organization. There’s a place for the people who refused to be swayed by the latest craziness.

Well, de Botton has started The School of Life; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

The School of Life is a social enterprise founded in 2008 and based in a small shop in Central London. The School offers a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well, addressing such questions as why work is often unfulfilling, why relationships can be so challenging, why it is ever harder to stay calm and what one could do to try to change the world for the better.[1] The School also offers psychotherapy and bibliotherapy services and runs a small shop which has been described as 'an apothecary for the mind'.[2]

Wow—what a seriously good idea! Oh, and what do atheistic you do when you’re in London on a Sunday morning? Here’s the answer:

On Sunday mornings The School of Life hosts secular sermons in which cultural figures are invited to give their opinion about 'what values we should live by today'.[7] These theatrical events are usually held at Conway Hall in London. Past preachers have included Tom Hodgkinson on Loving Your Neighbour, Geoff Dyer on Punctuality, Sam Roddick on Seduction and Alain de Botton on Pessimism.[8] The Financial Times described the sermons as being 'hedged about with all sorts of ironic paraphernalia, designed to reassure the trendy young audience that they are not about to be harangued by a religious zealot'.[9]

Oh, and that bibliotherapy up there? Here’s the answer:

 The School of Life offers a literary consultation service it calls bibliotherapy.[10] For a fee, people are able to meet with a bibliotherapist who will talk to them about their reading habits and 'prescribe' books which relate to their interests or concerns. The School of Life's bibliotherapists include the novelist Susan Elderkin.

Confession: I completely screwed up my last goal, which was to tell everybody in the world by midnight, 31 December 2012, that they could have a good, peaceful, spiritually charged death in their home at the hour (or thereabouts) of their choosing.

 I fucked up.

Alain, can I come give a sermon?

Cage recaged?

It’s been a day when all my rituals got shuffled, if not dropped. I woke up late, the morning went untrotted, the students never got their assignment, and there was seemingly nothing to write about. In a funk, I turned to a TED Talk on music by the contemporary composer Mark Applebaum.

And Applebaum is an engaging guy—bright, witty, funny. And his music is just as idiosyncratic as he is. He started out by playing a bit of Beethoven and then asking the question—is it music?

He then began to talk about his compositions, among which is the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra (nope—you’re gonna have to look it up yourself). And then he went on to demonstrate a new instrument he had invented: it had, among other things, all the combs he could find in the house, what looked like the ball from a toilet tank, and a coiled metal door stopper).

Right—so that was interesting. Now then, what about the music?

Well, it’s something that used to be called avant-garde and might now be called devant-garde. By which I mean that there was a time, in those days of the sixties, when blindfolded artists were flinging paint at canvases for a set period of time, letting it all dry, and then shipping it off to be displayed at museums, where people would stand about and pontificate. Or, painters would paint a canvas one solid color; there’s a whole room full of such art in the MoMA.

“Are we going to try to take this seriously?” I asked Johnny, who was standing next to me.

“Nah,” he said, and we both headed for the next hall.

Well, we all got busy doing other things, and somehow all that experimental zaniness faded away. So I was quite prepared, in fact very cheerfully prepared, to dismiss Applebaum as another gimmick, another in a long line of guys doing essentially the same thing.

Wrong. I ended liking the piece below, entitled “Aphasia,” which was inspired by seeing two deaf mutes having a heated conversation—a discussion full of affect but with no sound. And it’s clear—the guy must have worked long hours both to compose it and then to memorize it.

So what’s it all about? It’s a metaphor for the “expressive paralysis” that comes on in that dreaded moment when it’s a battle between the empty page of music and the composer—and the empty page is winning. Here’s what Applebaum said about it….

"Kids love it. So do people who need a break from conventional modes of expression."

Aha!—that’s why I liked it!

In this, however, not all people join me. Has anyone else noticed—the people who comment on YouTube videos have to be the most churlish in the universe? So I was unsurprised to run into this: Typical liberal arts bullshit. Trying to be edgy but comes off looking like something Tim and Eric created.

Tim? Eric? Who are they?

Well that was interesting, so what about the piece, Echololia? And what, by the way, was echololia? Echolalia I knew, as any old psychiatric nurse would—schizophrenics occasionally repeat the last three or four words of a sentence; kids do too, at a certain stage of development. The difference? Kids grow out of it.

The piece, at any rate, is a sequence of sounds that we wouldn’t necessarily consider music—drills, hammers, the screech of duct tape. Curiously, the only sound from a standard musical comes at the very end of the piece—and no, I won’t spoil it. So how would it sound?

Applebaum scores again! And here the churl that inevitably taps out his frustration in YouTube scoffs—John Cage did it all years ago.

Well that seemed like something I had to check out, and yes, as you can see below, Cage did much the same thing years ago.



Speaking of Cage, I didn’t know that he had been Merce Cunningham’s romantic partner for years—a fact of absolutely no significance. Just a drop of trivia dripping into the blog—sorry!

Well, that got me thinking—there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And I’m sure that Applebaum knows of Harry Partch, especially since they are (was, in the case of Partch) both Californians.

Partch was a definite loose screw—at one point he was a hobo, at another point he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And yes, he too invented his own instruments—he described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".

He did more—he decided to throw out the traditional scale and created, well…let Wikipedia describe it….

Inspired by Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned his instruments using the overtone series, and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music tradition's twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did not conceive his tuning in such a context.[28] Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers.

Confused? Join the club—I had several semesters of music theory, and I can barely wade through the paragraph myself.

So yes, Applebaum had people who had trod down the path he’s now treading—so what? Haven’t we all? And yes, I’ll go along, at the moment, with his answer to the question of the Beethoven? Is it music?

His response?

It’s the wrong question—it should be, “Is it interesting?”

Yes—to both Beethoven and Applebaum.

Warning: This site may give you ED

Well, who would have thought?

Young guys are giving up porn.

I know this because I’m watching TED talks, recently, and ran into one entitled The Great Porn Experiment. Rest assured, dear Readers, this elderly and respectable blogger has never EVER consumed a speck of smut, excepting those times when I pass Mr. Fernández at the computer.

It seems, however, that I am an exception, if the speaker, Gary Wilson is right. In fact, anyone studying the effect of porn on the brain has a little problem—there are virtually no guys out there who don’t watch it. So that’s a problem, where’s the control group.

It’s basic brain anatomy—a guy seeing a picture of a lusty babe, if that’s his persuasion, get a little jolt of dopamine. Now if the lusty babe is being her sultry self in dad’s Playboy magazine (found in the sock drawer or under the bed)—that little shot of dopamine goes away, after a bit. But what happens when that busty babe is on a computer screen?

Well, several things. In the first place, you can click faster than you can turn pages, and more important, if you put all the smut that’s on the Internet in a magazine under dad’s bed, well, he’d need either a ladder or more likely a helicopter to go to sleep every night.

So Wilson outlines the problem: a slight jolt of dopamine is a reward, it gives us a good feeling, and it makes us want to explore the world, one part of which is sex. But if you sit for hours at a time, as some guys do, and do nothing but consume one erotic image after another, what’s happening in your brain? You’re getting a positive feedback cycle of dopamine—the brain is craving more and more stimulation, trying to get back to the feeling of that first hit of dopamine. It can’t, of course—that’s the trap of addiction.

You enter something called arousal addiction, but other things are happening as well. You’re isolating yourself, you’re losing interest in other things, you start to feel depressed and anxious, and critically, you start losing interest in actual sex.

Two bad things happen—when you are with a real partner, you can’t get it up. And guess what? You’re 22.

So young guys have been getting erectile dysfunction, as well as getting medicated for depression, anxiety, and a host of other conditions. And unlike the erectile dysfunction in elderly guys, it’s not a plumbing problem, it’s an electrical problem—the brain is sending a weaker signal to the brain.

Then something really weird happens—you’re a straight guy, so why are you watching gay porn? ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me,’ you think, ‘am I gay?’

Relax, you’ve burned through your sexual preference, as it were, and now you’re searching farther and farther afield for stimulation.

So what are guys doing? They’re giving up porn, and waiting out the two to six months that it will take to rewire the brain. And as one guy said, that gives him time to study French, play the piano, exercise, etc. A porn addiction takes a LOT of time.

I live in Puerto Rico, which has a serious problem socially with arousal addiction. Car stereos are blaring, people are shouting, the landscape is littered with signs that seem to rush at you, screaming to be noticed. And everyone everywhere is beset with six things they have to do or want to do or are in fact just doing. I report this as absolute fact—I visit Manhattan and feel relaxed. Ah, a quieter, gentler time!

“Let me tell you about a place that is so dark the sky at night is ablaze with stars,” I would tell my students.

“Let me tell you about a place that is so silent, you turn off the refrigerator at night—it’s too loud,” I’d say.

“Let me tell you about sleeping alone in the forest, and hearing the rustle of something moving through the underbrush outside, and not knowing what it is,” I’d begin.

They looked at me blankly. Of all of the pleasures of the world, the one imaginable one for them was a moment free of…

…stimulation.          

Two Musicians, One Message

Well, I’m not immune to it. I have a dark side; I can feel envy, jealousy; the dark night of the soul occasionally visits me. So that may be why I had an absolutely negative reaction to the TED Talk that Ji-Hae Park gave today.

Park is first of all a wonderful violinist—she’s got a stunning technique and plays with terrific energy. She started off the talk by playing Vivaldi, and she nailed it. Then she spoke, and it was all over for me. She had, you see, struggled many years from depression, and then she had realized: the amazing power of music! So then she got cured, and went on to play at Carnegie Hall! Oh, and she was playing the Petrus Guarnerius of 1735, which a German foundation had lent to her.

So her message was play, play your life! Music will change your life, it had lifted her out of depression, now she is playing all the major halls, and prisons and leprosaria as well! And at the age of 28, she has decided to do a crossover album, a merge of rock and Baroque music.

I should be nicer; I should be able to have some empathy. I know something of depression myself, having been intermittently suicidal for many years; I also know something about music, having played the cello, also for many years. So why was I so antagonistic to Ji-Hae Park?

Well, we could start by saying that even in the darkest hours of my depression, music was never able to lift me out of it. Lexapro 20mg or music? Sorry, it was only the Lexapro that did it.

Actually, the cruel trick of depression is that you cannot do the things that you need to do to get better. So when I was really depressed, I couldn’t even listen to music—I was too depressed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The other thing that unnerved me about Park was the difference between her orgiastic energy when playing, as opposed to her little-girl affect when speaking. Is it a cultural thing? Is it my prejudice?

And why did I feel—it was only about her? Curious, I turned to a clip of her playing Beethoven Spring Sonata. Of all compositions, it’s one that is absolutely democratic; the piano is fully the equal of the violin. But even when the piano clearly has the theme, Park never steps back, plays her supplemental stuff quietly and lets the piano shine. She’s always on top.

Last rant—why do classical musicians always get so defensive? Why do we think that by adding a drum and sweetening up the music, we can get other people to love classical music? We’re just giving the message—no, we’re not good enough.

I watched the clip below twice.

Right, then I turned to another musician, and had the opposite reaction; I was moved to tears by the story he told. And notice, please, the music Gupta chooses to play—two pieces by Bach, the most cerebral music for the violin. Right, his technique isn’t anywhere near Park’s. But I suspect his heart is bigger by far.



And I was curious, as well, about the piece Park felt was insufficiently interesting and had to be jazzed up. I knew the piece—La Follia—and I knew that many baroque composers had written variations on the tune. In fact, Wikipedia tells me, over 150 composers have used the theme, among them being such non-Baroque composers as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

But here’s the un-rocked version.

You choose....

The Rich Get Richer

There are days when nothing works, or seem not to work. I am writing this in a café, since the Internet decided to drift off somewhere, and the cat decided to catch and subsequently torment a pigeon. So the music is too loud, and there are two Russians—also very loud—and two Oriental kids—still louder—all talking away. There is, however, the Internet as well as air conditioning.

And there is Kelly Ayotte to consider. She’s a Republican senator from New Hampshire who voted against the expanded gun control check in the Senate two weeks ago. And yesterday she had to go home and explain that vote to, among other constituents, the daughter of a woman killed in the Newtown massacre.

She’s getting heat, is Kelly, and she clearly isn’t happy about it. Her approval rating dropped 15%, and 50% of voters say that her vote on the issue will be a consideration for them in the next election. So some people held up “SHAME ON YOU” signs, and the senator stammered out something unintelligible and completely illogical about an undue burden. Later, she refused to speak after the meeting privately with two women who wanted to pursue the topic.

I made a promise to myself, several months ago—I would not let the NRA into my day. There is something called mental hygiene, which means that you resist the urge to focus on the negative, to lick old wounds, to obsess on whatever festering issues resonate most for you.

Right, scratch Ayotte.

Well, what about Sandra Day O’Connor? She sat down with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, recently, and revealed that she’s been rethinking that little decision about Bush versus Gore. Not, mind you, that she thinks she voted the wrong way. No, she now thinks that the Supreme Court should never have agreed to hear the case at all.

It didn’t do the Supreme Court’s reputation much good, she says, and that can’t be denied. It also did do her reputation any good, and that must pain her. But she said something interesting: "There were at least three separate recounts of the votes, the ballots, in the four counties where it was challenged, and not one of the recounts would the decision have changed. So I don't worry about it."

Well, she was always portrayed as a pragmatic, matter-of-fact kind of lady—not a theoretician or an intellectual, though of course she was no fool. But given that the decision convinced all but the die-hard conservatives that the court could be bought, why isn’t she more concerned? I’d be kicking myself still….

Right, so maybe O’Connor wasn’t the best person to turn to.

Right, scratch two.

So how about Nick Hanauer? He’s the guy in the clip below, who takes on the issue of the huge disparity of wealth distribution in the United States. And what he says makes intuitive sense, though Forbes Magazine pans his theories. But what else would you expect?

And Hanauer comes through with a refreshing idea—taxing the rich and using the money to help the middle class benefits everybody, the rich included. Oh, and by the way, the rich don’t create jobs—the middle class does, by running out to the stores and spending money.

Hanauer makes the case that like most guys, he buys a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, goes out to eat once in awhile. But his income is perhaps a thousand times the average. For him to spend proportionate to his wealth, he’d have to have 3000 cars.

It’s nice, you know, finally to hear someone say it. It’s past time, really.

According to a TED talk I heard recently, 997 billion dollars was lost in one year in corporate fraud in the United States.

Two questions…

Was it the CEO and executive directors who did it?

And if there had been more equity in salary distribution, would that figure have been lower?

Learning versus Teaching

News flash, Dear Reader—the capital of Washington is….

(Nope, it’s not Spokane.)

There was a time in your life when you knew the capital of the state of Washington. And you had a test on it, and on all the other state capitals.

“What’s the capital of the state of Washington,” I said yesterday to Naia, the little girl whose mother runs the café that is my office. Naia was busy being home schooled by her mother on state capitals last year when I first met them.

Naia gave me the look eleven-year-old girls reserve for silly adults.

 “I dunno, that was last year….”

Well, she may be home schooled, but she’s got the education system down cold. Quick—what year was the Magna Carta?

You may know—I think it’s 1215.

Quick—what WAS the Magna Carta?

Interesting to know—how many people could answer one versus the other?

Here’s the thing about Naia—she has correctly eliminated the useless data of state capitals (she has an iPad, if she needs to know a state capital, she’ll google it….) to create more space or capacity or energy for what she really loves, which is dinosaurs.

She was asking me, the other day, what my favorite dinosaur was, and though I was tempted to say Ronald Reagan, I decided to tell the truth: I don’t believe in dinosaurs. Yes, I know the whole fossil record absolutely and completely refutes me, and no, I don’t hold my belief so strongly that I would die for it. I just can’t get my head around animals that big, that massive, and especially I don’t buy the new theory that an asteroid wiped them out. And if people can deny the holocaust or believe that Obama is Muslim, well, I can not believe in dinosaurs.

Naia, however, took me on. She has a vast, untaught-but-still-very-educated knowledge of dinosaurs, as well as a fascination for the natural world. She knew, for example, that a bird of paradise was a bird—I didn’t. I thought it was just a plant. But Naia instantly informed me that the birds live in New Guinea and some parts of Australia. And she showed me a picture of one—look!

Nobody, you understand, requires that Naia know all about dinosaurs and birds of paradise. (Or is it bird of paradises?) However, it is vitally important to know that capital of Washington State so that Naia gets a piece of paper that will lead in four years time to another piece of paper that will lead in three years time to the acquisition of another piece of paper that will lead to a job. Because you need a Master’s Degree to get pretty much any job, nowadays.

Well, I had a job for about 35 years, and guess what! Not once did I need to know that the capital of Washington is Olympia.

What I did need to know is how to use a computer, that first day in Wal-Mart, in 2004.

I came late to the game—everybody assumed I knew what a file was, or what the desktop was, or what Excel was.

“Show me how to turn this on,” I was saying to Elizabeth, the lady who hired me—as she and I sat in front of the computer. Like so much else I did, it didn’t inspire confidence.

Seven years later, I had taught myself the rudiments of VBA scripting and was the acknowledged expert in PowerPoint. I could do all that because I shared a passion for something. No, not dinosaurs, but the cello. And if I could play the Chopin and Shostakovich sonatas, of course I could learn how to use Microsoft Office products.

It’s always the first thing cut, in the schools. Yeah, they may threaten to cut the football team—a sure way to get people to vote for the school board referendum—but when it actually comes time to start the slashing? That machete falls straight down on music and art.

As I write, there’s a guy pounding the hell out of some wood in the apartment above me. No, he’s not a construction worker, he’s a sculptor. I am writing this, which is an arguably creative thing to do. Below me, people are selling shoes. So two thirds of the building is being creative.

Or maybe the entire building is. Can you be creative in sales?

I think so. There’s a kind of magic involved when you meet a good salesman—how many times have you walked away with something you didn’t need until the salesperson told you you needed it, or implanted in you some desire for it?

I think Sir Robinson (view clip below) is right—we are doing a wonderful job of stomping out every last bit of creativity in our kids. Unfortunately, I think that’s what we want to do. The news that our schools do more deadening than awakening has been around for 40 or 50 years, and have we changed? Have we done anything about it? Are our schools better places, turning out better kids, smarter kids, more creative kids?

Well, at least in Puerto Rico, I would never have had the job I did had the answer been yes. Every child in Puerto Rico graduates with 12 years of English class—how could I possibly be needed as an English teacher? And why—since I had no credentials whatsoever and was going up against the professionals—did I succeed in getting people to talk?

I think most teachers get in the way. I think it’s better not to teach. I never really did, and still don’t, although occasionally I feel guilty for not having a lesson plan and vocabulary and written exercises and metrics for evaluation. I am not a very good teacher.

I do, however, observe learning fairly well.

Ordinary People, Heroic Acts

For the last two Saturdays in a row, I have taken two chairs, a pair of jeans and a shirt, a video camera, and a satchel with information cards and consent forms as well as two books, each containing about 350 pages, to a public square.

It’s the 30,000 Lives Project, in which I cheerfully consent to look completely ridiculous. My object is to read the randomly generated names of 30,000 people: the number of people who die every year of gunshot wounds.

Why do I do this?

I had to ask myself the question that first day—when I was visibly nervous. I had support, thank God. Raf was there, holding the sign that announced the project. Pablo was there, reading names and talking to people. Nydia strolled into the scene, kissed me and got right to work. Then doña Ilia strolled in and stole—blessedly though not surprisingly—the show.

The point is that nobody would have been on the plaza doing what I was doing if I hadn’t gotten pissed. The NRA was making me crazy—how many more massacres would it take before we had gun control? And yes, Facebook and the social media are fine—but all my friends think like me, for the most part. That’s why we’re friends.

So the real work wasn’t the ten hours of copying and pasting in the one hundred name batches that it took to generate the 724-page document. And the real expense wasn’t the hundred bucks spent on printing the books, fliers, consent forms or sign. The real effort was to put myself out there—to make a fool out of myself and to expose myself to the possible scorn of NRA members or gun “rights” advocates.

I don’t do well with conflict. Or so I thought, because when I encountered that first day a gun rights advocate, the conversation was surprisingly cordial. I heard him out, disagreed, and parted company. No big deal.

Well, it’s been two Saturdays—we’ve read six thousand of thirty thousand names, or 5% of the total. And we’ve spent 4 hours doing it. So it should take 80 hours to read the names of all the people who die of gunshot wounds in the United States. Yup—two full work weeks.

So now we know. But is it worth it? Do we get anything from having Marc and friends stand / sitting around in public reading names?

I think Philip Zimbardo would say yes. And he should know—having written my Psychology 101 textbook those many years ago. So I clicked on his TED talk, and was immediately hooked. It’s that old question—if you were a German in Nazi Germany, what would you do?

Sadly, we know what you would do. You would follow the crowd, go off to war, press the button that sends the poison gas into the nostrils of the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in the chamber next door.

Or you wouldn’t. There was a German resistance, there were people hiding prisoners of war or Jews or anybody who needed hiding. So maybe you wouldn’t have colluded, maybe you would have been a hero, which is, according to Zimbardo…

…an ordinary person. A seamstress with tired feet, as Rosa Parks was that day she sat at the front of the bus. She didn’t wake up and say, “hey, I really oughta be a hero today,” she later said; she just had tired feet.

Years ago, at Wal-Mart, a motivational speaker concluded a talk by pulling out a dollar bill. He talked about how a person had given him a dollar bill with the message: go ahead, dream, follow your passion, you’re a leader and you can make change happen. So at every talk he gives, he pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the person he sees having leadership potential.

There were about thirty people in an one-of-you-will-betray-me-moment—‘is it me?’

Well, I took the dollar in complete confusion, and did the only thing I could think of—put it under the laughing Buddha that then sat on my desk and now sits on my desk. And no—I haven’t spent it.

But if I was the person with the most leadership potential—and that guy really should cut out the morning bottle—it’s probably due to one thing.

I’m gay and I came out.

After you do that, you learn two things. First, that you can do it—that you can have the courage to face social disapproval, professional suicide, parental rejection. After that, standing in a plaza reading names is no big deal.

Second, going along with the crowd is not so important. Being liked is not so important. You realize—I’ll make my crowd, I’ll make my family, and no, I don’t have to have people like me.

Zimbardo talks briefly at the end of his talk about the bullying issue. And I agree with what I suspect would be his analysis—it’s stupid to tell a thirteen-year old kid “it gets better.” Sure, it’s true, and yeah, if feels good to say it. But do you remember how long time was when you were a kid? Christmas or a birthday took centuries to come around—now they pop up every other day.

I would tell these kids—“hey, you know what? There’s a reason you’re getting bullied, and it’s a good reason. You’re different, and that’s wonderful. There’s something special in you. I don’t know what it is, but I can sense it, and so can the kids around you, and they’re jealous ‘cause you’ve got something special, something to give, something unique. Do you know what it is?”

Kid looks up.

“Nah….”

“Well, that’s what we’re gonna find out….”

Notes From a Non-Creative Person

I’m a bear of little brain so I listened to it twice and if I still don’t get it, well, I probably won’t.

It all started when I read an article by a model who gave a TED talk about the fact that she didn’t deserve her luck. She makes zillions of dollars because of genetics: she’s tall and willowy and white. Oh, and also symmetrical. So everybody has decided, “wow, she’s hot,” and that’s very useful because you can sell things with sex and that’s important because, well, that’s how the world works.

So now the video has been seen by more than a million people and people are approaching her with book deals and TV shows and she’ll probably end up the Mistress of the Universe and we’ll all have to bow down six times a day to her Loveliness, as well as cede all our property to her and half of our sons.

Sense annoyance?

Dammit—I had a message I wanted to give through TED, and it was a hell of a lot more important than that. And guess what? They turned me down, in order to give a supremely entitled person a chance to be even MORE entitled. Of course beautiful people get everything, of course it’s the handsome guy who becomes the CEO or the senator or the whatever-he-wants-to-be. Remember high school? That’s what you learned there.

Now—thanks for asking—my message was this: you can organize your death just as my mother did. You don’t need to rot away from Alzheimer’s or cancer or just plain boredom. When the time comes, you stop eating and drinking. And no, it’s not a bad death—quite the opposite, really.

Well, I was storming or steaming my way through the article of Her Absolute and Obnoxious Loveliness who has, by the way, just graduated magna cum laude from Columbia (presumably Harvard and all the other Ivy League colleges were lusting to have her; she chose Columbia to be in New York, the center of the modeling world….) and watching my fists ball and hearing my nose snort when I came to a little link: Ted.com, Amy Tan on Where Creativity Hides.

Well, I have a particular debt to Amy Tan because in theory she follows me on Twitter—still think the whole thing had to have been a mistake—and I’ve never read any of her books and I feel badly about that. Come clean—I have read half of one of her books, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and loved it, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I finish it? Because the second part is set in a foreign place and I can’t read about foreign places. But aren’t you living in a foreign place, you ask?

It’s just a thing about me and you know what? OK, I’ll stop being defensive.

OK, so I can live in a foreign place but not read about them, would my debt to Amy be cancelled if I watched her talk about creativity? And what, by the way, is the word that defines your relationship with someone following you on Twitter? A twitterite? A fellow bird? Twitty?

So here she is talking about creativity, and I am understanding only a third of it, although I’m totally enjoying the humor of the slides and also the creative elements in them and I’m in trouble because whatever Amy says about not understanding quantum mechanics is exactly what I’m feeling about her talk.

I’m lost.

Which is totally not good because (sorry about that jump there—I was screwing around with those little callouts, in case you hadn’t noticed, although really shouldn’t there be a person attached? Just a sec—let me run over to the Internet…..)

Right—what I was saying before these damn dogs walked into the post was that I didn’t get any of what Amy was saying about creativity and that’s terrible because I want to be creative and think I should be creative but guess what?

I’m not.

(Though I have discovered where the dogs live on the computer and fiddled around for ten minutes with the callouts—every time I moved the callouts, the dog moved. Oh, and also discovered the spelling of “jejune”—thought it was jejeune….)

And there’s this thing lurking in my head—I have to write a novel.

Which is absolutely awful because it will take a million years and I’ll have to figure out about character development and structure and stuff I don’t even know that I should know.

The only thing I know about creativity is that I was compelled to do it and

WHAT! Shit, that’s my father, dead these two decades, come from the grave to tell me to write a novel?

She had more of a gift than I, and when I died, I stood by her side and watched her write, and then in the evenings and nights I went into the back bedroom where she wrote and cleared away the coffee cups and put her glasses where she could find them and then I read what she had written that day. Just the way you do, at five o’clock every day. And then she died and it fell to you and your gift is greater and she knew it and who kept you from throwing yourself in the traffic that day.

Domine.

Yes.

Thank you…and I’m fucked.