An Echo Of Milton Glaser's 10

For the original, see "Ten Things I Have Learned", by Milton Glaser

1 You can only work for people that you like.

This depends on what you mean by work, but it seems like the key word here is "for". I prefer "with". It's possible to work for almost anyone, but possible only to work with those whom you trust, admire, feel comfortable with, and are inspired by. And then it isn't work anyway.

2 If you have a choice never have a job.

There is a quick test for job security. If someone can walk up to you any day, at any time, and say "You're fired", then you have a job. If you have a job you can lose it. And in this case it's worse, since any random drone can take it away. Go back to item one, look at it, and try to find the place and the people that make you want to sing.

3 Some people are toxic. Avoid them.

Think about it. Are you spending your time with people who are sore losers, and also sore winners? Are they obsessed with fear, hate, and greed? Toxicity always revolves around those qualities. Toxic people focus on the past and fear the future. They're always gnawing on an old bone and growling. There is no hope, and never even a feeling of freedom. Being with them is being in prison.

4 Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.

To the novice anything is possible, but to the expert, at best, only one thing is. I've worked with people who defined professionalism as being what clothes you wore, or even better, the act of wearing a tie. Professionalism in its best sense spins off of what people do but never inspires their actions. Procedures are for drones. Policies define broad guidelines within which humans can be human and use their own judgement.

5 Less is not necessarily more.

Sometimes less is only less. Sometimes more is only more. It's best to start by knowing what you are doing and what you need to get done. Then you can add or delete to sharpen your point.

6 Style is not to be trusted.

Style is like professionalism. It comes from the work but doesn't create the work. If style was really important then there would never be a new style. Styles would be immutable. Style is a byproduct of creativity and simply falls out. Not everyone can create a style or even follow one, and anyway it is a result of reflection and analysis and not inherent.

7 How you live changes your brain.

This is subtle but obvious. The only requirement is to pay attention and then you'll see it happen. Until I began photographing with transparency film did I not notice how blue shadows are. That was years ago, and it's still with me. If you aren't a photographer or a careful painter you won't see this. The same applies to any creative endeavor. It takes constant work to be creative, and then after some while it continues to take effort, but the paths are well known.

8 Doubt is better than certainty.

I remember hearing Anne Lamott say that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. Certainty equates to hubris. Hubris equates to aggressive stupidity. Stupidity is not good. Doubt is a gentle guide which can lead one to unexpected and wonderful places. Doubt is better than certainty. Any day.

9 On aging.

It doesn't matter, as Glaser says. Noting matters. We're all dead. Cemeteries are full of indispensable people. Even if age did matter, what are you going to do about it? Really. Stop to think for a while and you realize that life itself is horrific. No matter who you are or what's going on, you get to this conclusion. The next step is to ask yourself what you're going to do about it. It doesn't matter. You can go on and see what happens next, or not go on. You'll get to the "not go on" soon enough no matter what. No one really knows what life is or if it's got a point. The universe does not care. If it cared then everything wouldn't be eating everything else. Did it ever occur to you what a huge waste it is for one animal to be eaten by another, or for millions of plants to be eaten before they reproduce? The universe doesn't care. It's overflowing with waste and loss. Therefore it must not be waste and loss. Somehow. Or else we have no clue at all. I don't think we have a clue. It doesn't matter. This is a rich place. It can throw us away, all of us, and never notice.

10 Tell the truth.

Lie to others and you are lying to yourself. Lie to yourself and you are lost. Therefore do not lie. There will be trouble because of the truth, but trouble is all life is anyway. It's idiots all the way down. Euripides: "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish." Right?

The Mattias I Would Be If I Could

Life can be fun. Especially when the fun comes unexpectedly.

Today while looking for something to illustrate the idea of "backpacker" I found Mattias Adolfsson.

I don't know much of anything about him except that once again I wish I could draw, maybe paint, or at least had decent color vision.

Lacking those qualities, I'll have to appreciate them who got 'em.

Mattias Adolfsson: "Freelance Illustrator living in Sweden with Wife and two daughters. My pen is a Namiki Falcon fountain pen, with this I use American eel from noodlers ink, for coloring I use Watercolors."

References:

Mattias Inks, the blog
Buy Handmade Prints at Etsy.com
Web site
Flickr sets
On the Behance Network
Spraygraphic Interview with Mattias Adolfsson

MMMillington

It's a basic rule of life that you can learn from others.

Well, no, not a rule. Exactly.

Rules all are published in books, aren't they? And each and every one of those books is a textbook. Right? And each textbook is one you have had your nosed stuffed into in grade school. Of course.

Otherwise it isn't a rule. Because rules are important. So important that they are voted on by huge committees of sighing adults, whose entire lives are taken up by the process, and who regard their doings with the utmost respect. And so keep doing those doings until they fall over from either age or exhaustion. Or sometimes, perhaps, from lack of food. So important is the process.

And each item output from the committee is printed posthaste, in a list, in a book, and that book, those books, are distributed immediately. Because of the extreme importance.

These are the rules, after all, and need to be out there.

And one of these rules, near the top of the list, is the one that says you can learn from others. Mostly, I believe, if I've got it right, if I remember it right, is that each and every one of us is required to learn almost every single thing from our parents.

You know who they are.

That's the beauty of it. Parents are handy, and they get paid to bring up loads and loads of children. Messy, loud, vagrant children, sprawling every which way and running into things and making them sticky. Parents have to deal with all this because it is a requirement of the job. And to make up for that, and because of the high rate of pay among parents as well, they inculcate us with the rules.

Of course not all of them work well. Parents. Some parents are faulty, or behind the times. Some simply don't care, or have the right tools. This is true, and this is sad, but this is life. We all live it from time to time, life. And those who live learn. The two go together.

If not from our parents then, we must learn from others.

And that brings us to Mil Millington. And Margret. And "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About". The only real guide any man would ever need in life. To be honest about it.

Sorry, parents. But this is done better than you can do.

It is one giant web page. If you define "giant" as being full of words. Ask me, it ain't half long enough. And no longer maintained. He had a mailing list, and though I joined it way late, I still got a couple of updates, but it appears that is over now.

Owell.

He has books. "A Certain Chemistry" is my only confirmed read so far. But I do have a copy of "Love and Other Near Death Experiences". The local library has been generous and has agreed to loan me the second one, now that I've returned the first. Or they didn't recognize that it was me again.

Doesn't matter as long as I have the book, and a working lock on my front door. It's mine for a couple of weeks and they won't get it back until I'm done.

And I mean that.

Meanwhile, if you can read, and if you can read with little pain and so on, try "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About". There's a link at the end of this page. It will do you good. Your parents should rest easier knowing that you're getting honest instruction, especially if they're still alive. Because at minimum, if you are busy reading, you will have no idea which direction they took while sneaking away.

So, a sample:

What Margret and I have, essentially, is a Mexican stand-off with love instead of guns. OK, yes, sometimes there are guns too. The important thing is the mindset, though. Sure, people can argue about important issues, that's fine, good luck to them I say. But where, I ask you, are those people when you take away the meaningful sources of disagreement? Lost. Utterly lost. Let me illustrate the common mistakes amateurs might make using something that happened the other week. You will need:

Margret.

Me.

A roast chicken.

We're having tea and on the table are the plates, a selection of vegetables and a roast chicken in an incredibly hot metal baking tray. Getting this chicken to the table has been an heroic race that ended only fractions of a second short of a major skin graft. Due to this haste it is, however, not sitting precisely centrally on the coaster. Some kind of weird, hippie, neo-Buddhist couple might have failed even at this point and simply got on with eating the meal. Fortunately, Margret is there to become loudly agitated that radiant heat might creep past the edge of the coaster, through the table cloth, through the protective insulating sheet under the table cloth, and affect the second-hand table itself. She shouts and wails. I nudge the tray into the centre of the coaster, but, in doing so, about half a teaspoon of the gravy spills over the side onto the table cloth. Outside birds fall mute, mid-song. Inside, frozen in time, the camera swings around us sitting at the table, like in The Matrix.

'What the hell did you do that for? Quick, clean it up - quick,' insists Margret (where an amateur would have, say, shrugged).

'No,' I reply (at the moment when another amateur would have been returning from the kitchen with a cloth), 'I'm eating my tea. I'm going to sit here and eat my tea. Then I'll clean it up.'

'No, clean it up now.'

'No.'

'Yes.'

'No. I'm going to eat my tea first.'

'Clean it up now.'

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so a couple of semi-pros might have worked this up into a shouting match. But I am not about to stoop to childish name-calling. Instead I lift up the tray and pour some more gravy onto the table.

'OK?' I say, 'Now stop it. I'll clean it up after.'

'Clean it up now.'

I tip a little more gravy onto the table.

'I'm just going to keep doing it every time you say that. I'll clean it up later.'

'Do it now.'

More gravy.

'Now.'

More gravy.

This continues until we run out of gravy.

I must make it clear that my actions here seemed perfectly rational at the time. I've mulled them over since, of course, and am relieved to find that they still hold up to examination: it's pleasing to know I can make good decisions under pressure. Anyway, we eat the meal from a table awash with gravy. I am happy to have argued my point persuasively. Margret has a smile fixed to her face due to the belief (incorrect, yes, but it's only her enjoyment that matters) that I've clearly done something hugely stupid that she can bring up later in any number of arguments - possibly years from now. Everyone wins. We eat, united in contentment. I clean up the table.

Do you see? I want everyone to try this out at home and write me a report for next week.

References:

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About web page.
Love and Other Near-Death Experiences: A Novel by Mil Millington
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: A Novel by Mil Millington

The Little Girl Giant

I'll never see her. Nor any other characters from "The Saga of The Giants".

They do not touch these shores, and I can guess that they never will.

The company producing the shows that Little Girl Giant and her associates appear in has been all over Europe, to Korea, China, Vietnam, Chile and Africa. They spent six months in Africa and three months in China, but they have never been to North America. It is likely that they are not interested in us. There is no telling what might happen here. We may be a too-volatile country for their strangeness to tempt.

Their first four productions were "The giant falls from the sky", "The giant falls from the sky, last voyage", "Return to Africa", "The giraffe hunters", and "The hidden rhinoceros". The latest in this loose series, the one in which Little Girl Giant appears as a traveler, is "The Sultan's Elephant".

Director Jean-Luc Courcoult said of his work, "I am very keen on the element of surprise. I distract the public's attention. I hypnotise them so that nobody, even when it is in the open, understands how an enormous machine could appear so suddenly. I believe that this almost childish desire to please people by surprising them is a deciding factor in my work. I have seen adults crying as the giant leaves. They have obviously lived other things, sometimes difficult, and yet this makes them cry."

The company behind this is is Royal de Luxe, located in Nantes, France, and is little known.

The 3quarksdaily blog has a stellar essay on the London production of "The Sultan's Elephant", which commemorated Jules Verne's hundredth birthday in 2005. From there: "The venue is simply the streets and open spaces of the city -- by the lake, by the harbor and in the city center. Admission is not only free, but accidental, since the show may begin anywhere, even in two places at once, and will overtake its audience bit by bit, for they shall not have known where to assemble and wait for it. Once it begins, it will keep moving, and people will follow it or even try to run a little ahead of it en route to the next corner it seems bound for, where others shall have started to hear things and look up. No member of that audience, not even the most avid, will see the show in its entirety -- like the London event, it will be structured to make that impossible. Courcoult has said only that a special story for Icelanders will be enacted, by Little Girl Giant and other familiar figures, that, on the morning of May 10, 'something unexpected will happen in Rekjavik.'"

Julian Crouch, an artist, told of his experience when the Little Girl Giant was first lifted from the time-traveling space ship found stuck nose down into the pavement of central London. "When they lifted her out of the rocket, the crowd just gasped. I tried to stifle my own gasp, but by the time she blinked and shook out her hair, I was absolutely and completely lost. She was beautiful. But really beautiful. In a deep way. And there was a little voice in my head that said, 'you could never, ever have made this.'"

Later, standing in line with his son, waiting, waiting to see if his boy would get his own short ride on the giant's arm, he was seized by fear that it would not happen, and wept, relieved, finally, when his son did get a turn.

There isn't much a person can say without having been there. I've seen videos on YouTube and elsewhere, and though they're mesmerizing they can't ever come close to spending four days in a dream world alive with giants. It must be like finding that your town has been overtaken silently by Burning Man and thousands of followers between the time you fell asleep and the time you again wakened the next morning.

The Little Girl Giant is 20 feet high, and the elephant who provides her morning shower bath stands 40 feet high and weighs 46 tons. They are attended and operated by a small army of technicians in red livery, seeming refugees from the 18th century.

Little Girl Giant's hair is made from the tails of 50 horses. Her breathing continues day and night, powered by an internal motor. Her eyes blink. She can lick sweets. She squats and pees in the street while her operators discreetly turn their heads. She naps frequently.

Although there have been books written on Royal de Luxe and their productions, and DVDs available, they don't seem to have made it to this country. We're stuck for now with a bunch of miserable-quality videos on the web. But they are still haunting me.



References:

YouTube Videos
A better quality video: Little girl giant plays in the park
The Sultan's Elephant (Has PDF downloads you might like, telling the story.)
Royal de Luxe theatre company
The Little Girl Giant
3quarksdaily Royal de Luxe: the saga of the giants, by Elatia Harris
Images: Royal de Luxe Central
Images: I, for one, welcome the Giant French Rocket Girl and her Elephant of Royal Luxury!
Images: au coin de la rue (Flash, in French)

Dreaming Of Socks

This is going to sound strange, but pay attention. There are lessons here.

A few days back I discovered a new web site. Well whoop-de-do, you say. Who hasn’t? At least one a day. Or more. True. One point to you, but who’s keeping score? That wasn’t the main idea anyway, just the intro.

Here’s the deal. This site has a lot going for it, a lot of things everyone can learn from, and it’s worth investigating, especially so if you are a woman or know one. (How universal is that?) So if you want to stop reading here and do your own looking and thinking, go right now to Sock Dreams. Whether or not you come back is your decision, as they all are.

Here’s what I see that makes an impression on me.

First, the site is distinct, unusual. In a good way. You won’t accidentally mistake this site for another, although its basic structure is pretty average. There is a big banner at the top with a navigation bar just under it. Main content is placed vertically along the left side. On the right is access to the shopping cart, to a search option, and a menu listing more specific product categories.

There is nothing unusual about this, but the graphic designer made it look special. The colors on the navigation bar don’t quite “match” in a way we’ve all gotten used to. They aren’t all the same, or shades of one color marching in a steady procession from one end to the other but they work together to make a person curious about where they lead.

The type flows. The home page is full of curves, inviting. There is white space. No crowding. What you see first is “Welcome Sock Lovers & Dreamers!”, and then some clues about what kind of place you have found: “Female owned & operated in Portland Oregon since 2000. We’re not your usual sock shoppe, nor do we intend to be.”

There is a large logo under the introductory text. For me this is a little too big and a little too flashy, but it is distinct, and helps establish the site as a non-corporate sort of place.

Overall the site works, and well. It is quirky, unusual, unique even. And that is good. The site is colorful and well organized. There is a good use of Flash, normally the bane of web sites. Usually Flash is applied with a shovel by inexperienced designers gone amok, eager to show cleverness and ignorant of business needs, but here, in one small pane on the home page, it works, simply and unobtrusively. This one little view displays a few rotating product shots without either locking up the whole site or driving visitors away, screaming.

So right up front this site establishes what it is about and what you can expect. It looks simple but isn’t. There nooks and hidey-holes, surprise turns, several ways of getting to products and information about the products. Come in through the main menu and peruse general products. Then click on an image somewhere and pop up inside a whole line of similar products, or a line of products from one manufacturer, or somewhere else again. It’s all good.

Exploring here is like being in a funhouse, a friendly one. You don’t care about getting lost or being abandoned at some dead end, and you aren’t. This is rare.

Images, images everywhere. Though I can’t find it now, I believe I saw a statement that the owner, Niqkita, does most of the photography. Whoever does it, it is stunning. These are not standard catalog shots. They are not socks pinned to the wall. Each image is unique. Each one is interesting. The models and sets vary. Many are outdoors. Each color of a sock has its own image, with the model in a fresh pose. Nothing stale here at all.

I know exactly how a guy sees the product shots, and I can understand why the name of this business was once “Fetishize Me”. I can almost guess how women see them. Almost. It must be fun. But not kinky. This isn’t a sex shop, but more like a playground. Or a party.

There is a lot for young spicy women, but also for every other woman, and for every girl you can imagine. That is made clear. The owners and staff are obsessed with socks and things (anklets, arm warmers, foot care products, footie socks, garter belts, gloves, half socks, knee highs, leg warmers, leggings, midcalves, over the knee, petticoats, scarves, sock garters, t-shirts, thigh highs, toe socks, washing supplies, wrist bands...and more).

The “About” page is personable and interesting. It is clear. It is easy to read. It was not written by a software program, a lawyer, or a corporate drone. The story begins with “Years ago there was a girl whose feet were always cold”, and goes on from there to tell the story of the business and the sock faeries who work there. You end up dead certain that you will be dealing with real people.

Want to know about shipping and payment policies? Just go to the pages that deal with them. There is no need to enter into a transaction just to get to the buried shipping options page, only to find that they can’t deliver to you anyway. Many, many other sites get this wrong. Many of those sites belong to large businesses, and they all deserve to close.

Not Sock Dreams, which also has a simple and interesting FAQ page, with photos, and easy links to more information. Again, it’s all up front, well written, sprightly, and easy to get to.

One feature I stumbled on, one that isn’t openly linked to, is a weblog (the “Sock Journal”). This illustrates two more good aspects of this site. First, it is focused. The blog does not have long rambling stories about vacations, or recipes, or politics, or relatives. It’s about socks, and illustrated. Every post leads back to the store somehow, but with a soft sell. It is all lighthearted and full of photos. Once again, the quality of the photos is fantastic and they help breathe more life into the products.

Second, there is an ongoing dialog between the owner and her customers. They share their experiences and their exuberance for socks. Sounds silly, but the customers go nuts for it. They love socks and the shop. The owner loves socks and loves helping her customers. And it keeps the store thriving.

The overall approach of this site is humble and playful. It represents a business but one with heart. Each part of the site is focused. The owner makes it clear that she does not and will not carry every product, and gives her reasons. You understand. It’s about socks and she wants to keep it that way. And you end up agreeing.

References:

Sock Dreams
Sock Journal

Playing With The Dead

I have finally succeeded in finding someone weirder than I am.

I am not weird. I am unique. I am special. I am fun, and inquisitive, though I have secrets. Very special secrets that I will not tell you about because that would make me just like you. And maybe I don't want to either like you or to be like you, and maybe not have you like me either. Also, being honest here, just why would you be interested in any of my secrets anyway?

Are they really secrets or am I just being private? Is that allowed anymore?

Maybe that's enough, the just wanting privacy thing. People think that if you like being anonymous and quiet and sort of staying over there at the edge where things are calm and no one asks you to do things you don't want to, that you have a disability, a "secret", and then they want to "know" it, and bug you about it. Which ruins all the fun of either being private or having secrets, or of both having secrets and keeping your own thoughts in a carefully tended garden where they can play without being loudly hooted at by boors with bad breath and sticky fingers.

Maybe it was my friend Arnie who first clued me in to this. It is my first memory of the difference between me and normal people. I was still in grade school, the lower grades, and hence very young in today's terms, since today is several decades farther on. Arnie was over at my place one day. Come to think of it now, we moved out of that place around the time I was 10, and I don't recall my sister, who was born when I was eight, so we're looking back through a long time tunnel.

Arnie and I were playing Chinese checkers and eating candy. I think I noticed that some of the marbles were sticky. Arnie did it.

Right there, that was it. He had sticky fingers. This is something that I have strenuously avoided my whole life, even then. I could not believe that he would let his fingers get sticky, or put up with it once it happened. He said it didn't bother him, so I tried it. I got so sticky that I could hardly spread my fingers. You could almost hear the velcro rip as I pulled the fingers apart, then allowed them to magnetically back together again, and then repeated the cycle.

I think that Arnie did wash his hands before he went home, but I did it almost immediately, after 15 minutes or so of trying on stickiness for size. It didn't work for me then and doesn't now.

I don't like getting stuck in things, especially the thoughts of others. Don't like ceremony or routine. My most hated word is "should", most hated phrase is "supposed to". I like taking a clean look at things and coming to my own conclusions, which is one reason I didn't do any research papers in college.

Luckily I was able to get by. No one really demanded any, but it was an option. I preferred to go the other way, to do my own reading directly from original sources, do my own thinking, and then write down my thoughts. Good thing that I was in literature instead of sociology or history. Not like today, when teachers demand research, and students then pay others halfway around the world to whip up something, or cut and paste from Wikipedia. There was cheating way back when, but I never saw the point. I was paying for the pain, might as well attain the gain. No one ever came close to pretending that I ever, ever could have stolen words elsewhere. Because they were original. That was obvious.

Because they were weird.

That's another word I hate. Weird. My sister gets a pass. She can say it. She has paid her dues, and I owe her apologies for many things, so she gets in free. If you say it you might go home with a bloody mouth and swollen lips. Just because. Just because you're an idiot. At least say something that requires a few seconds of thought. Please. It will be easier all around. And I won't have to go to jail to get my point across succinctly.

So there I am, being original in my own sort of way, a legend in my own mind, which is not too bad considering that people will get all freaky if you tell them you have enough clothes to do laundry once a month. How stupid are they?

And this one wasn't my idea, it came from a friend who once confided that he'd bought enough socks and underwear to go two weeks. A month is a whole lot better, so I customized his method. Sometimes I can stretch to five or six weeks with a bit of judicious hand laundering. Once you've stopped spending two hours every week doing laundry you gain a new perspective. One month's laundry takes maybe two and a half hours. Compare that to about nine hours the old way.

But an idiot will say, of course, "That's weird". Which is equivalent to saying, "I'm a total idiot and I've never had a thought or emotion unique to me. All I know is what I see on TV, so I'll go ahead and bray now", or of just standing there and drooling while staring at the wall, waiting for instructions.

So if you (yes even you) go off half cocked, fully cocked or otherwise and do something not even remotely original but only uncommon or even unexpected, then you will see the whole flock pivot to face you and quack and gabble in unison, "That's weird", and then stand there, waiting for you to burst into flame and quit annoying them by being not what they all are.

Which is a good reason to keep to yourself. Which will inspire more unique thinking. Which will trigger more idiots to gabble and drool.

Which is tolerable in a way, but they can be dangerous in groups, if challenged, or if simply startled too suddenly by originality.

This is the story of my life. But now we have the internet, so now it's possible to run across things that force you to admit that there are people out there more original and more creative, harder working, odder, stranger, more wonderful and scary than you could ever be. And they even provide (1) photos, and (2) stepwise instructions.

Right now, I can honestly say that I have no idea how I found the mouse mouse. Maybe it was a couple of weeks ago when I was searching for video clips of how to make and use lightweight backpacking stoves for my other blog. Somehow I can't quite remember the connection, but bing! there was a picture of a mouse with a mouse inside it.

This was the interface of electronics and taxidermy, of computing and biology, of irony and butchery. Someone stuffed a dead mouse with a computer mouse, and posted the results for the world to see.

I wouldn't have done that, probably, but I sent it to my sister. She needed to see it.

Hey lookee, kid, I didn't do this, but someone did, and they're weirder than I am. I'm not weird if you'll recall but in case you need proof again, here it is, kid.

I haven't heard from her. I'm sure she liked it in her own way. I didn't dig through the details but only looked at the photos and she probably never visited the Instructables web site, but she had proof. One or two photos included with the email would have been enough. Remember now, I'm not weird, right? I know I'm your brother and I spook you every now and then, but lookee here, this is really weird, right? I mean. Look, eegh.

For good measure, and in the interests of providing balanced coverage, and also to prove that compared to the rest of the world, even to little girls, I'm pretty harmless after all, I sent another URL and another photo or two on mouse taxidermy (amateur, home-style, kitchen table hacking) showing a young girl holding up two dead and dried mice in costume.

She seems pretty happy about it. The girl in the pictures, not my sister, who still hasn't responded. She seems to think it's normal and fun, the girl.

This could be true where she comes from. Who can say?

I myself, having thought it through have decided not to call it weird. (What in hell is that word even supposed to mean anyway?) But to think of it as possibly gruesome and perverse (which can be a fun way to label other people), or maybe only as unnecessarily strange. I say "strange" as in unfathomable.

I like little things. I especially like rodents, and kept hamsters for years. But live, playful, healthy and happy hamsters, and respectfully buried them when they wore out. Given that keeping a pet often involves imprisonment, especially for small animals, I always regarded keeping a pet as involving a sacred contract. In turn for imprisoning a hamster, who would gladly have run off to be suddenly eaten if given the chance, it was my responsibility to give it the best and most solicitous care that I could, first to make up for the evil that I did by keeping it in a cage and then because it deserved the most interesting life I could imagine for it in payment for depriving it of its natural entertainment by running free and dying young.

None of this, in my book, involves killing an animal, hacking it up, and stitching it back together around a miniature computer mouse. Or stuffing if full of LEDs and batteries. Or dressing its tiny dead body in tiny crude costumes and playing house.

So OK, there they are, playing with their dead things. I hope my sister is happy now.

References:

Mouse mouse.

Mousy dressup.

Do You Know Who You Are?

I mean really. Do you?

Are you smart? Funny? Ethical and principled? Do you grab whatever opportunity floats by and let the consequences fall where they may?

Would you pocket a wallet you saw someone drop? If so would you keep it if the person came back looking for it? Would you lie if asked about it? What would you say now, and what would you say if someone asked next week, or next year?

Do you really know who you are? Maybe, but I bet you're like everyone else and keep changing to fit your environment. Try this sometime.

Meet your friends for pizza and beer. Change the situation around to match your own life. If you don't like pizza and beer, then make it a picnic, or a birthday party for someone's eight year old daughter. Whatever works for you.

Be yourself. Don't try to do anything unusual or out of character. Just remember what happens, how you feel, and what you do. Store the memories away somewhere. Keep them handy.

That's easy enough.

Now walk into your boss's office. If you don't have a boss, then use your bank, your church, or some place that gives you the same kind of feeling, like a dentist's office.

Let's say that it's your boss and today is your performance review. What happens will vary from place to place, from boss to boss and from individual to individual. But it won't be anything like having pizza and beer with your friends.

Are you relaxed? No. Do you feel like all the pressure is off? No. Are you sure that you can say absolutely anything at all and they will get it? No. Do you just walk in and expect things to unfold perfectly? No. Are you sure that whatever happens, you will leave happy and satisfied? No. Are you behaving differently? Yes.

You are a completely different person right now. Who you are depends on where you are and what is expected of you. You may think that you are one distinct person and you just do different things at different times in different places, but that isn't true.

Not at all.

You are a collection of roles and behaviors. You think different thoughts, say different things, experience different perceptions, produce a distinct physical presence depending on where you are and what is expected of you. It isn't so much that you are an actor pulling on a different costume as you are a consciousness waking up inside different stories.

This is a subtle process, a delicate realization, a revelation that may take some thought, but it isn't really too far out. Once you get used to the idea that there is really no one home inside you, no real you, it's pretty simple. You are a bunch of learned responses and some little-used potentials.

That's why you surprise yourself from time to time. Something in "you" comes bubbling to the surface every now and then and you learn a little more about who "you" are and what "you" are capable of. It can be nice, or not.

It can be that you like avocados after all, though you never did before. Or maybe you say something that makes everyone laugh until wine squirts out their nostrils, something that never before crossed your consciousness, or theirs. But there it is, all over the table.

If you're married, would you ever have guessed it would be to THAT person? Really? Or did things unfold, and then one day you finally realized what was going on, and admitted it, and that was OK?

If you're still not too sure about all this, that you're not really in control because you're not really here, then try a few things.

Try regulating your heartbeat. Consciously. You can't.

Lying down and staying very still is allowed, but won't work, nor will running up and down the stairs.

Unless you want to make it really clear. If so, then go ahead and run up and down those stairs for a while, and in the middle of it go ahead and change your heart rate to one beat per minute. Or 10, or 50. All the same. You can't, because you aren't home. "You" are only a visitor.

You are not in charge here. You never have been.

The part of you that you think of as you is only an occasional guest. Your consciousness wakes up from time to time when it's handy, and swirls its fingers around in the soup of thoughts, images, smells, sounds, and emotions that is always cooking, and pretends that it has something to do with them.

Well, it does, but not much.

If you sneeze and shoot goop all over, it's nice to have a hanky already out and in place. You sneeze into it, no one sees the goop, the goop stays in the hanky, you fold the hanky, discretely wipe your nose a couple of times, and put it away. Handy but not a big deal. A tool.

Like consciousness. Or rationality if you prefer. It's handy but not a big deal. It's a small part of you, whomever "you" are anyway.

Still not sure?

You can try some things. You'll probably get bored and give up pretty soon, but that is proof too.

Ready?

OK. Be rational then. Pick a vegetable or fruit you've never eaten. Read up on it. Make lists. Take notes. Learn everything you can about it, and then decide if it's a good thing to eat.

It will be of course. It's not like they just throw random objects into the bins at supermarkets. Any food you pick will be a good thing to eat, so that's what your conclusion will be. You are allowed to look at photos too, but not to smell, touch or taste your target food ahead of time.

Now for the test.

Because once you've reached your rational conclusion, you have to go eat the food. Let's be generous here, and add a time dimension. A fudge factor. Let's say that you have to eat this new food at every meal for a week, and then once a day for the next month, and then decide.

You won't be able to do it. Probably not. But even if you do, what happens will not be based on your research and your decision. What happens will be based on the animal you inhabit.

It will taste the food, and feel it and smell it, and it will let you know if it wants to take the first bite, finish that, and have so much as one more. There is a really good chance that you won't even get through the second day of your plan. Food is like that. Especially food. Even if you think you like it.

You can eat a new food and gag every time you try it. No thought required. Then one day you have to have it. The same food. It tastes the same but now it's good. Huh. No thought required, and any thought you might have had would not have helped anyway. Your animal decided, along the lines of ancient animal principles, and you go along for the ride.

You like that, do you?

It's even better. What's going on is not "along the lines of ancient animal principles" because there aren't any. Protoplasm and slime and squirming blind things do not have principles. They have something or other but we can't fathom what it is. Not really. It happens. It works. We live with it. We have to.

Still not sure about all this? Try another idea: your body is dark inside. Every thing a millimeter or so beneath the outermost layer of your skin is living in the dark, and has no eyes. It doesn't think, or go for a walk. It has never been to school. You don't know it, yet you are made of it. And it is in charge.

Dark meat.

So you don't want to screw around with strange vegetables or your internals. That's OK. Try something else. Things taken by mouth are especially good since they go straight to the mindless snuffling animal part of us. We relate immediately to taste and smell. We have to. We are exquisitely tuned to accept or reject anything entering the mouth because of billions of years of practice which has taught our blind selves to make snap decisions about what works and what does not.

Or else they die. In ugly ways.

So beer is good to experiment with. Try a Guinness. Better yet, a bottle of Theakston's Old Peculier, "The beer that made Masham famous! A dark, strong beer Old Peculier is justifiably famous for its rich and complete character, its sheer strength. Brewed using the traditional Fuggle hop."

Bet you haven't tried either on of them yet. Bet you won't like either. It took me a dozen or so tries at Guinness until it became tolerable. This was a rare case of rationality working, sort of. It was history what done it.

My boss at one time was an expert on Colonel Custer, and on his post, Fort Abraham Lincoln, south of what is now Mandan, North Dakota. (This is the same guy who is always called General Custer, but he wasn't. That was a brevet rank, in effect for only a few days. He went back to being a colonel very soon, and stayed that way until he died. You know the rest of the story.)

The soldiers at the fort were especially fond of tinned oysters and Guinness, which in the 1870s came to them in clay bottles, and my boss had made a specialty of finding them. The soldiers drank, and then threw the empties over the river bank and a hundred years later Norman dug them up. He even wrote to the Guinness company to identify exact years they had made specific bottles with specific imprints stamped into them.

So I thought I had to like it. Didn't. Like drinking strange yeasty molasses. But if they had liked it so much in the 1870s there must be something there, I thought, and kept at it. After enough effort I started liking it.

So you might say that this invalidates my whole premise here, but it doesn't. The forced drinking was a rational act, but the dislike wasn't, nor was the liking that followed. My animal got used to it and decided to keep it up. All I did was to supply the stuff. If "I" had never acquired a taste for it, "I" would have given up on it. It's pretty nasty after all. Old Peculier is nastier yet but does have a great name. Tastes something like Guinness but more so. More peculiar. The Fuggle hops and all.

Don't like vegetables or beer, go ahead and buy some shoes, or take up mud wrestling. Do something you know "you" won't "like" and see what happens. Either you won't be able to change the thing you think of as your mind or you'll find yourself surprised by what happens, and your mind will go along for the ride.

Either way it will not be the result of dividing a sheet of paper into two columns, labeling one "Pro", the other "Con", and listing ideas. Toting up a score does not make anything work out. Only the animal decides, and it can't count.

You aren't home and there is nothing you can do about it. Other than waking up into a conscious state every now and then and enjoying whatever show is playing on your retinas.

Life is so weird innit?

person: c.1225, from O.Fr. persone "human being" (12c., Fr. personne), from L. persona "human being," originally "character in a drama, mask," possibly borrowed from Etruscan phersu "mask."