Month: May 2014

by Chris Bodenner

A reader sees “a couple of glaring holes” in this monologue from Louie:

First, lots of fat girls have boyfriends. Maybe that one fat girl can’t get one she finds acceptable, and her frustration is well-expressed, but the idea that being a fat girl means you CAN’T get a boyfriend is simply false. This country is full of fat women (and fat men) who are dating and married and popping out fat kids. We have an obesity epidemic, remember?

Second, when she goes into the thing about how he can just talk into the microphone about being overweight and it’s adorable – well, yeah, but he’s a famous comedian. Again, it works great in the scene, and for those characters, but trying to generalize that point is insane. Lots of fat guys get girlfriends (just like lots of fat girls get boyfriends), but tons more fat guys have absolutely no success with women. They can’t all just get on stage and have a persona. Lots of them end up with crippling anxiety and social phobias because they can’t get an iota of positive female attention.

So, as usual with Louie, it’s an amazing show with a fresh perspective and characters that seem to intimate universal truths. But also as usual, under close investigation those universal truths turn out to be closer to polemics that are just really well-written. Louis CK doesn’t intend them to be philosophical arguments, but expressions of his own very narrow, very personal perspective, and we should read them that way.

Another is much less forgiving and makes some solid points:

Wow. What a pathetic mix of self-pity and self-indulgence. “How is that fair? And why am supposed to just accept it?” Should I mention the obvious: during this whole scene a number of people pass the whining lady actually running. Yes, exercising.

So, here is my reaction to this lady:

No, you are not supposed to just accept it. Stop whining about fairness, put a pair of sneakers on and start doing something about your weight if it is your real concern. And no, you don’t have to if it does not get in the way of your fulfilling, happy and productive life – but that’s not what you sound like. So if you excuse my bluntness, either make your inner peace with your fat arse or do something about it.

And no, I am not some arrogant prick with good genes. It requires constant efforts for me to stay fit, and it has been that way for my entire adult life. I am a middle-aged man whose weight has been fluctuating around the “dreaded” BMI of 25 separating “normal” from officially “overweight” for as long as I remember. For the last 2 years I managed to stay below that mark, but not through some genetic luck or “fairness”. As I said, I was not dealt particularly good genes as far the waist size is concerned. All it will take for me to go back over that BMI 25 waterline is stopping to pay close attention to what I put in my mouth and starting to skip my every-other-evening swims and Sunday soccer games. And it will not take long to get there, no more than a month.

And by the way, I work long hours. I have to – I am a sole bread-winner in the family. Heading back from work at 7 pm I always have a choice to make: go home, have dinner and relax, which sounds incredibly appealing every bloody evening, or get over it and head to the swimming pool for an hour first. Trust me, the latter is never an easy choice, and I routinely find excuses not to do it and yet I also know that it feels very rewarding afterward whenever I don’t listen to my own excuses.

I also realise that my choices are not for everyone: small children at home or a number of other very real priorities may skew the balance and make my personal “good” choices not so good for someone else. But my point is exactly that: for many of us with with “susceptible” waistlines the actual girth is merely a matter of priorities. If it really bothers you, make it a priority. If you’d rather spend that extra hour at home with kids and/or indulge in sweet treats – it’s a legitimate choice, but then don’t whine.

And by the way, you want to know what is really unfair as far as the dating market is concerned? Try talking to short men. Or better yet, short bald men. No, I am not bringing any personal complaints here: I am 5’9” – definitely not tall but not pathologically short either, and in any case I am happily married to a beautiful woman. Yet I observed on many an occasion the short end of the dating stick reserved for short men. I understand that for many women these are unconscious decisions rooted deeply in biology (height + full head of hair may signal some genetic superiority), but that does not make it any fairer to the recipients of such unconscious attitude. And guess what: we can’t change our height or simply regrow a full head of hair while the chances are, you actually can change your waistline. So just knock it off please.

Readers offer advice to go along with the stories:

Sounds like a great opportunity to renew your vows.

Another:

My little suggestion: think about what you want to leave behind, and let the ring symbolize that shedding, and then decide what you want the new ring to bring in to your lives, and make the loss a renewal of your commitment. Hope that helps.

Or maybe a little bit of both. Another idea:

I am so sorry about your ring. This may be a crazy idea, but what if Aaron agreed to donate his ring to a pool of gold from which two new rings were cast?  Then some of that gold on your finger would also date back to your wedding.

Maybe a little too much work. Several more readers sound off:

So sorry to hear about your loss.  You, of all people, earned that ring. Not sure this is what you want to hear, but you might tell your other readers that a hospital will not likely INSIST that you take off your ring.

You can request that they secure it in place with adhesive tape.  My wife and I have been married nearly 28 years, and I’ve been in the hospital many times (cancer, chemotherapy, several other surgeries and been anesthetized 12 – 15 times) at six or seven hospitals, and have never taken off my ring.  They ask, I say no, they cope.

It helped that my wife is a registered nurse who had worked in several hospitals, who knew that I didn’t want the ring off and who knew the ropes.  She was able to prime me.  Hospitals are worried about loss of the ring or (in the case of diamond or other jewels) injury to the ring, loss of the stone, etc. Taping fixes that.

A labor and delivery nurse agrees:

This should not have happened.  No married person should be asked to remove a wedding band prior to surgery.  The band should be secured in place with tape during the pre-op prep in the anesthesia area.

You may have limited energy for taking on a new cause, if you are recovering from surgery.  But, the pre-op procedure at your hospital is NOT standard, and should be changed.  The thought that a wedding band could cause either contamination in the OR or loss of circulation to the ring finger is absurd and has been debunked.  It is indeed rare, and very outdated, for any hospital to have a protocol requiring patients entering surgery to do without the most important object they own – their wedding band.

Another offers a permanent solution:

Get one tattooed on. They aren’t going to ask you to take off your finger …

Another suggests having stand-ins:

I know I would feel terrible if I lost mine. I’ve even become attached to a secondary wedding ring I have. On our honeymoon in Hawaii, my wife and I got inexpensive rings to wear while snorkeling or doing other beach activities, lest our wedding bands fall off in the water. Mine is made of palm wood. I’ve worn it during all of our beach vacations during our four years of marriage.

Recently I thought to myself that if I lost it while swimming, I’d be just as upset as if I lost my wedding band. The wooden ring holds so much meaning and so many wonderful memories itself.  So, truly, I’m sorry for your loss.

One more reader:

I feel for you.  A couple years after our commitment ceremony in 1998,  I took my wedding ring off, laid it on the bathroom sink so I could wash my hands, was distracted by something and wandered off.  Two hours later I did what you did – grabbed with my right hand for my left ring finger and panicked when I found it bare.  I TORE THE HOUSE APART looking for it, to no avail.  My husband came home from work and found me weepy-eyed and distraught on the front porch. He was so understanding – “It’s just a ring; Tiffany makes more.” but I was bereft.  Another two hours of searching, then a flash – “THE BATHROOM!” A search around the sink. Nothing.  Did it fall down the drain?  Removed the sink trap. Nothing.  A trip to the basement to figure out if I could break into the cast-iron waste stack to … what?  I had no idea, but as I was staring at the pipes, a shout from upstairs: “FOUND IT!”  I had knocked it off the sink and my husband found it wedged under the toilet.  I cried.

My husband has put that ring on my finger three times.  First at the commitment ceremony in front of a hundred family and friends in Detroit.  Then in San Francisco City Hall in 2004, soaking wet from a night spent on the sidewalk in the rain, when we joined 4,000 other couples who married that glorious Valentines Day weekend.  That marriage was voided, though we have the certificate framed on our bedroom wall.  The last time he handed me the ring was in 2010 in Boston, surrounded by parents and siblings, nieces and nephews (none of whom were alive in 1998), when we married, for good, on the 6th anniversary of our San Francisco adventure.

Every morning I swim a couple miles.  And every morning I take my wedding ring off and clip it to my keyring.  The water compresses my fingers and, because of my swimming, the ring fits a little looser on my finger than it did in 1998.  My fear is that it will fall off and get sucked into a drain I can’t open.  So I keep it secure and slip it back on after I shower.  It is just a gold band, but it’s also a talisman, a symbol not just of our love, but of the journey and adventure we have shared for nearly 20 years.  It is what I reach for when I’m worried or sad or excited.  It is what reminds me of what’s really important.  I am so sorry for your loss.

In an excerpt from his new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean ponders the possible connection between religious experience and brain disturbances, especially epileptic seizures:

All human beings seem to have mental circuits that recognize certain things as sacred and predispose us to feeling a little spiritual. It’s just a feature of our brains (Richard Dawkins excepted, perhaps). But temporal lobe seizures seem to hypercharge these circuits, and they often leave victims intensely religious, as if God has personally tapped them as witnesses. Even if victims don’t become religious, their personalities often change in predictable ways. They become preoccupied with morality, often losing their sense of humor entirely. (Laugh lines are few and far between in Dostoyevsky.) They become “sticky” and “adhesive” in conversations, refusing to break them off despite pretty strong signs of boredom from the other party. And for whatever reason, many victims start writing compulsively. They might churn out page after page of doggerel or aphorisms, or even copy out song lyrics or food labels. The ones who visit heaven often chronicle their visions in excruciating detail.

Based on these symptoms, especially the rectitude and sudden spiritual awakening, modern doctors have retrodiagnosed certain religious icons as epileptics, including Saint Paul (the blinding light, the stupor near Damascus), Muhammad (the trips to heaven), and Joan of Arc (the visions, the sense of destiny). [Emanuel] Swedenborg also fits the profile.

Ultimately, though, Kean warns against reducing the numinous to the neurological:

Most seizures last a few seconds or minutes, not the hours that some prophets spend immersed in trances. And because a temporal fit can paralyze the hippocampus, which helps form memories, many temporal lobe epileptics can’t remember their visions in much detail afterward. (Even Dostoyevsky lapsed into vague descriptions when recounting their actual content.) Also, while Swedenborg’s trances in particular blended sights, sounds, and smells into a heady, heavenly froth, most epileptics hallucinate with one sense only. Most damningly, most epileptic auras are tedious, producing the same refulgent light, the same chorus of voices, or the same ambrosial smells time and again.

So while epilepsy might well have induced their visions — the idea makes sense — it’s important to remember that Joan of Arc, Swedenborg, Saint Paul, and others also transcended their epilepsy. Probably no one but Joan would have rallied France, no one but Swedenborg would have imagined angels eating butter. As with any neurological tic, temporal lobe epilepsy doesn’t wipe someone’s mental slate clean. It simply molds and reshapes what’s already there.

(Image: Illumination from Liber Scivias, showing Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision, via Wikimedia Commons)

In an interview about her new book The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison addresses whether it’s wrong to empathize with those who’ve made others suffer:

I think that trying to understand someone’s state of being or feeling doesn’t necessitate condoning or agreeing with their point of view. Getting inside someone’s mind doesn’t mean thinking what they think; it only means realizing what they’re thinking. This gets to another question or distinction that has come up in various conversations I’ve had—with psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists—about empathy: should we empathize with sociopaths? With evil? And I think we should try precisely because empathy doesn’t have to catalyze complete agreement or convergence—only an entry and a reckoning. Andrew Solomon’s recent New Yorker profile of Peter Lanza—father of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza—is a perfect illustration of this distinction: he offers his readers the chance to empathize fully with this father and yet—also, improbably—with the figure of this boy, whose actions might seem to place him outside the realm of empathy entirely.

On a related note, Joanna Bourke contemplates how pain fosters connection:

Talking about pain is a way of cementing interpersonal bonds: when people ‘suffer with’ their loved ones, they are bearing testimony to their closeness to that person. Witnesses to pain often find the experience agonising themselves, which can lead them to further intimacy with sufferers. This is what Claire Tisdall alluded to in her memoir based on the First World War. Tisdall, a nurse, admitted she’d been ‘burning with the agony of losing a dearly loved brother at Ypres’ and so her ‘feelings towards them [Germans] were less than Christian’. Nevertheless, one day she was given the job of looking after some German prisoners on their way to the hospital. One ‘very young, ashen-faced boy’ with a leg-wound looked up at her and murmured ‘Pain, pain’, an episode about which Tisdall wrote: ‘a bit of the cold ice of hatred in my heart… softened and melted when that white-faced German boy looked up at me and said his one English word – “Pain”.’

More than half a century earlier, the physician Samuel Henry Dickson in his Essays on Life, Sleep, Pain, Etc (1852) put the case more strongly: ‘Without suffering there could be no sympathies,’ he concluded, ‘and all the finer and more sacred of human ties would cease to exist.’ At the very least, pain exposes our fragile connection to other people and serves as a reminder of our need for those around us.

Meanwhile, in a profile of James Doty – who helped form the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, or CCARE – Bonnie Tsui describes the science behind “helper’s high”:

When we help someone else or give something valuable away, the pleasure centers of the brain, or mesolimbic reward system, activated by stimuli such as sex, food, or money, provides emotional reinforcement. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies by the National Institutes of Health have shown that the reward centers are equally active when we watch someone give money to charity and when we receive it ourselves; in addition, giving something valuable away activates the subgenual area, a part of the brain that is key in establishing trust and social attachment in humans and other animals, as well as the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be highly involved in the complexities of altruistic decision-making. What researchers call the “helper’s high” may be aided by the release of endorphins. By virtually every measure of health we know—reducing blood pressure, anxiety, stress, inflammation, and boosting mood—compassion has been shown to help us. These are some of the ways we are encouraged to establish trust and community, which have long been necessary to human survival.

Previous Dish on Jamison here, here, and here.

Rachel Kadish shares her experience teaching a creative writing course at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, where her classroom doubled as a bomb shelter. Noting that her 11 students “spanned six nationalities, as well as a range of points along the religious spectrum (some were wholly secular Jews, some Orthodox, some Christian …)”, she announced to the class, “We’re going to offend each other — let’s consider that a given”:

Religious difference, it turned out, was only the beginning of what surfaced in the classroom.

Any writing exercise I assigned — no matter how technical and craft-based — tugged at larger issues. In the weeks that followed, a woman in a head covering wrote a moving piece about childhood memories of terrorist bombings. Another woman — a dancer — wrote a powerful scene about sneaking into a West Bank bathhouse and dancing with Palestinian women there. A Christian woman wrote about her teenage immersion in mosh pit culture in the U.S., and offered the first pages of a harrowing piece about friends who joined neo-Nazi skinhead hate groups. Challenged to rewrite a single paragraph in three different voices, a Swedish student began a nostalgic passage extolling his mother’s baking. By the third iteration of the same paragraph, he ended up revealing that his mother was an Auschwitz survivor, and that this bounty of pies and cakes stood in sharp contrast to her own childhood of starvation. …

I’ve never before written about a workshop. What happens in class stays in class. So when I asked my students whether they’d be comfortable if I wrote about the work we’d done together, their quick assent took me by surprise. “The conversation in this room is different than the conversation on the bus,” one said, to nods. In daring each other to explore literary craft, they’d given each other permission to explore stories many of them had feared to tell. And of course, our weeks together had expanded my point of view as well. When I walked out of that bomb shelter for the final time, it seemed less a metaphor for the threat of war, and more a reminder of how difficult and how essential it is to create shelters like this: safe places where heartfelt argument, human gestures, and the occasional interpretive dance keep the lights on.