From taupe to titubas: A story of romance in the Internet age

From taupe to titubas: A story of romance in the Internet age: An engaged couple I know were using search engines to discover the name of the color of their couch. In doing so, they stumbled across a description of a tituba, a Jewish marriage contract, in the exact shade of their taupe couch.

This story struck my romantic chord: a shared search to describe a shared piece of living room furniture led to the finding of a contract people have used for thousands of years to commit to a shared life together.

The Internet is like an infinitely large messy room that accepts everyone’s belongings -- everything from priceless treasure to worthless junk. Search engines are tools that people use to wade through these objects of varied value or relevance to find what they need.

In wading through these objects, though, one can be lucky enough to find objects of high value and questionable relevance to the matter at hand, like titubas instead of taupe.

From Dog-Men to Penicillin: What You Can Miss with Perfectionism

From Dog-Men to Penicillin: What You Can Miss with Perfectionism

There's sometimes magic when my less-than-perfect vision and my less-than-perfect memory to perch my glasses on top of my nose combine to make me walk around in a blurry haze.

I once saw a dog’s head perched atop a man’s body on a walk to work. I’ve also seen tree branches floating in the air and people without facial features.

The hallucinations are surprising and entertaining and one of the many reasons I would never undergo laser surgery.

Now, before we consider a revolt against ophthalmologists, psychologists, teachers and everyone else who helps people improve their vision, let's heed the sage advice of Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

There's examples of wisely-kept mistakes everywhere. Take Spencer Silver: in 1968, Silver, a 3M researcher, tried to make a strong super-glue like substance. He failed, and only made a weak adhesive. Six years later, Arthur Fry, another 3M researcher, stumbled onto Silver’s sissy sticky and became the father of Post-it notes.

And there’s Alexander Fleming, of course, who was known as a brilliant researcher with a messy laboratory, careless work habits, and a habit of sneezing on cultures. In 1928, he threw away a culture plate, took off on vacation for two weeks, and came back to discover a mold growing on the throw-away.

It turned out the mold bullied bacteria. He named it "Penicillin" and it's cured everything from scarlet fever to syphilis for generations.

Years after his discovery, Dr. Fleming toured a perfectly sterile, state-of-the-art medical laboratory. The proud tour guide asked him what he could have possibly produced in those superior facilities.

Dr. Fleming's answer was a sweet, sweet success: “Not Penicillin!”

From Deprivation Springs Enlightenment: Living Without a Television

From Deprivation Springs Enlightenment: Living Without a Television

I never understood the religious practice of fasting when I was growing up in a Jewish home. To me, fasting was "very hungry" with a fancy name, and it would not bring about enlightenment, but instead an obsession with food. And Yom Kippur still finds me guiltily cheating, an act I justify by eating only small quantities of beets, which I detest.

However, I have developed an appreciation for other deprivations. When I moved to New York City, I decided not to buy a television or engage in any television-like activities (DVDs, youtube, etc.) in my apartment. My reasoning was that I did not need a TV when Manhattan was my playground.

But for a long time, life without a TV was not pleasant.

Yes, I did have the Internet and Manhattan and work and friends, but there always seemed to be nooks and crannies of time when I was alone and bored or upset or angry or lonely, and it seemed that only TV could possibly distract me.

There were withdrawal symptoms: whenever I saw a TV in a store or at a friend's house, my eyes were transfixed to whatever was on the screen and nothing could break my concentration. When friends discussed TV shows, I felt left out.

On the other hand, there was that challenge of living without, and the feeling of being different and, by definition, special. And so, I persevered.

And, over time, I began to appreciate what I did have. I like my own company and I know how to make myself laugh. I go to more plays and museums, I read (a little) more than I used to.

I discovered interests I never knew I had. Music is now my coffee. I sing and dance to Sheryl Crow or Soul Asylum or Frankie Vallie every morning.

And I have discovered I love to write, after a 20-year break from the practice. My blog is a psychoanalyst that is available whenever I am, for free. I write three or four entries per day -- entries that are trivial or babble or make sense only to me.

I write in those little nooks and crannies of time that I normally would have reserved for that addictive box with those moving images.

I write out of deprivation.

The Physics of Anticipation

The Physics of Anticipation

I enrolled in physics three times in college and withdrew from the course each time because I simply could not understand it. A lack of comprehension of all things spatial forced me from Physics 101 to pre-physics to the equivalent of a "Physics for Complete and Utter Dummies" course until I finally retreated to Statistics for Teachers.

But metaphors have always intrigued me, and potential energy, the one concept I thoroughly understood from my three aborted attempts to study physics, has provided a lot of fodder.

To my professors, potential energy was "energy possessed by an object by virtue of its relative position or state," like the tension in a rubber-band ready to be snapped.

But, to me, potential energy is the physics of anticipation.

Potential energy is what I feel when I wait in line to see a Broadway show. Or that little thrill while I wait outside a diner to brunch and gossip with my best friends.

And, really, when I harness it correctly, anticipation is energy. Hum-drum Wednesday is the day when the weekend of the past is a distant memory and the weekend of the future is light-years away. But my plans for Friday night inspire energy, like a lighthouse-sighting by water-logged sailors.

Yes, physics as a science was a complete waste of time for me. But physics as a life-style? That's a whole different story.

When Baby Trees Only Look Innocent

When Baby Trees Only Look Innocent

When I was 9 years old, our school had an assembly about environmentalism and we were each given a little tree to plant in our front yards. Because I lacked a green thumb and was prone to laziness in most physical activities, when I returned home, I promptly abandoned my little tree in the garbage without a thought.

Little did I know, six months later, that little tree's ghost would rise out of the garbage and stab me in the back. The revenge came in the form of a required writing contest at school. The topic? To write what became of our little gardening experiment.

Being the little brown-noser that I was, I could not possibly write the truth, so I foraged through my imagination for a fib. My thought process was that I wanted to lie as little as possible, so the tree in my story would, in fact, have to die.

When one needs to place blame in these sorts of situations, one's father is always a very handy plot device. So, the tree became a victim of my dad's inability to control his lawnmower. In my story, I recounted my tears of grief.

In fact, I became so absorbed in the writing of the essay and my pity over the fictional me that I over-shot the mark of how compelling the essay needed to be and I won the writing contest.

My win made the pages of my story beat like O'Henry's "Tell-Tale Heart."

But my guilt was assuaged when I learned of the "reward,"which was to read the essay over the loudspeaker at school. As a painfully shy child, this felt like a fate worse than that of the tree.

Indeed, when I read the essay over the loud-speaker, the shrieks of my shy nature and the screams of my conscience exacerbated my childhood tendency to mumble and speak quickly: my classmates were left without a clue about what became of my tree, in either the fictional or non-fictional sphere.

Contra dancing is a little bit like life ...

I went contra dancing this weekend, and I found many aspects of it rather profound

First, no one likes a wet noodle. You must provide some tension in your arms when dancing. In life, too, I think people don't like people to be TOO easy-going. Doormats are for walking over because there's not much else to do with them. Yes-people are simply not trustworthy because no one agrees with you all the time, so by definition, yes-people must be lying, or evading the truth, sometimes, or, at best, have a vacuum of air in between their ears ...

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Second, if you smile and laugh and look your partner in the eye, no one really cares if you don't know what you are doing; even you as a beginner dancer care a lot less about not knowing what to do. When I was little, I used to think when you get older, there was an almost audible click at some point, and you instantly understood everything. That everything -- every judgement and choice -- would be so clear. There are no audible clicks, and we all live with uncertainty. But, if you smile and laugh and look at people and listen to them, most people -- even that little doubtful voice in your own head -- become very forgiving.

And if they are not forgiving, screw 'em: you'll change partners soon enough!

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Third, when you try something new, you may be a little sore the next day. I was a little sore from Contra dancing, I admit it. In life, too, you're not truly living if you don't experience some aches and pains, some trials and tribulations. Trying new things, using different muscles, can be ache-inducing, and there's no certainty you won't break (or at least embarass yourself, as I'm sure I did yesterday).

But if you never, ever take that first step onto that dance floor, you have to live with that curiousity, that intense itch of never knowing what fun you could have had, what success you could have achieved ...

The National Museum of the American Indian and My Own Personal Tree

I went to the National Museum of the American Indian downtown yesterday. To be honest, I wasn't that thrilled. Maybe it's that I'm getting a wee bit tired of museums and hence did not devote the time and patience it takes to truly enjoy a museum. However, the building, with its high ceilings, were quite beautiful and ...

There were 3 movies, and while the middle one was not edited very well, it really had some profound things to say, I thought. It was this expose on a contemporary elder of this Indian tribe. The tribe is very interested in plants, and especially trees.

And I must say, I, personally, have always had an interest in trees.

They're just so stately and elegant and graceful. Like ballet dancers, they have that strong but relatively thin foundation and those arms that stretch into the air with extreme flexibility. They also seem like elder statesman, with their height and memory of a distant past (which is why the Indians were fascinated with them).

My favorite tree lives right outside my home here in the city. It has always fascinated me because it has a gate that runs straight through it. Yes, deep in its trunk, coming out of both sides, is a wrought-iron gate.

What this probably means is that at one time, a long, long time ago, there was a gate and a tree began to grow underneath it. Upon encountering the gate, the tree shrugged its shoulders, and just kept right on growing.

It seems like a healthy tree, but it is right in the middle of an urban obstacle course. Coming home from the train, passing by what has become known in my own head as "My Tree," I smile and think of my own obstacle courses, urban and otherwise ...

And I know that I will grow straight through my own gates ...