Author: James

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An overused word

 

When I hear a certain word used frequently, I perk up. I don’t want to miss out on a hot, go-to word that’s fun to say and might make it easier for me to connect with others. But, at the same time I want to steer people away from saying something inappropriately when pop culture has taken a wrong turn.

That said, I fear that the word “gross” has become terribly overused, and often to describe non-gross conditions. I’d finally had enough when recently on a plane, another passenger put her carryon in the space above me. In order to make it fit, she had to rearrange some other luggage and in doing so some loose dirt or sand fell off that bag, mostly onto my lap. Some of it must have gotten on her, though, because she loudly exclaimed “Gross!” But, a little dirt is not gross. What was gross was her excessive rudeness – she got it all over me and never uttered an “excuse me” or even a quick little “sorry”.

So let’s examine what it means to be gross. In this context, it means disgusting or repellent. Here are several such qualities that should be easy to agree on. Sticky. Smelly. Certainly slimy. Wet by itself is usually not gross, but moist often is. To go a step further, I think that in order to be gross, something must also be organic. If you’ve ever encountered gross plastic, it was gross because of something else on it, or the damage it had wreaked on its surroundings, not it in itself. Plain dirt, even wet, is not gross. Now bacteria are everywhere, especially in the soil, so you might argue that their presence makes dirt organic and therefore potentially gross, but the key word here is “potentially”. I contend the quantity of bacteria must be enough to produce a foul, or at least discernible odor.

A human being can be sticky, slimy, smelly, moist, and is definitely organic. And there is hardly anything more repellent than an infected pus-filled wound or an unwashed crevice. But only a part of a person can be gross, never the person as a whole. You still must exercise caution around a person. If a poorly timed use of the word makes a sick person’s day even worse due to embarrassment, than you are the truly gross one in that situation.

But aside from such an extreme example, what’s the harm in overusing gross? Isn’t fun to exaggerate, to make fairly simple events seem more grand and exciting than they really are? The harm is in producing unnecessary alarm. Unnecessary alarm can lead to overreaction, deploying resources away from important places to where they aren’t actually needed. Or leading a person to embarrass himself by squealing in fear or revulsion when there was nothing to be scared of at all.

Maybe you think you have a right to exclaim how something makes you feel. If you think it is gross, than it’s Gross!, right? Based upon the authority vested in me by my ability to write whatever I want on this blog, I say, well, maybe. If you weren’t able to contain your automatic disgust reflex, than most likely it was really gross. But if someone thinks it’s okay to call gross on whatever produces a slight tinge of unpleasantness, than I should have the right to ask questions about it. What’s moist about that? Are you sure that’s really gross? Go ahead and touch it and then see if it’s gross. Or my favorite, it you think that’s gross, what about….? I could get into trouble with that one, since I often have trouble with quick decisions.

You have a right to your own opinion, but also an obligation to fellow members of society to clarify the individual nature of this judgment. “I think that is gross.” Is sufficient. Or if you make a broad declaration out of habit, Gross!, and then realize it isn’t actually gross, just add on “to me”.

If you think writing several hundred words on this subject is a gross waste of time, then please consider the underlying message. It is important to think about what you say, and to be as clear, accurate, and honest as possible. Obviously you cannot always be taking accurate note of everything – the unconscious mind successfully processes most of what you encounter. But if something is truly gross, your automatic disgust response will kick in and guide you appropriately.

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When She Lost Part of Her Mind

 

Most people in their early twenties hardly know what it’s like to live without a cell phone. Well I lived without one for about 35 years and know exactly what it’s like. So I thought it would be fun to write a story from the point of view of a college age person who drops her phone through a sewer grate where she can see it, but not reach it.

This idea occurred to me during a trip to Thailand with my wife in 2015.  I made the main character a young nursing student, since I had been a nursing student about five years prior. I decided to put her in a study abroad program in order to set the story in Hat Yai, where I noticed a number of very large grates in sidewalks. And I wanted to involve the Prince of Songkla University since the faculty there had so graciously hosted my wife and me while she gave some lectures and conducted workshops. The result was When She Lost Part of Her Mind.

Preparing this for release on Amazon has taken most of my free time recently and is why I haven’t posted more on this blog. I have included a link to the page today and I have included a link. If you don’t see this until after the promotion is over, please just contact me and I will be happy to make a copy available for you.

https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07F3HDH43&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_vtupBbPVFZTHS&tag=participastor-20

 

 

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Getting Close to Someone, Part II

Hi everyone,

This has been finished for a while, but I lost confidence that it was interesting or funny.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out. If you like it, great. If you don’t, well, that confirmed my suspicion that is still needs work. But I hope you enjoy it.

 

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Getting close to someone

I’d be thrilled if Participastory.com found a way to help people understand each other better. That might not happen, but I can at least try to point out some of the humor in human interactions. I especially like to poke fun at how we communicate. We can transmit complex formulas around the world in seconds, but even educated adults express some of the most important information – what we think about and want from each other – like little children, with eyerolls, shrugs, and “I dunnos”. Sometimes it is because we just don’t know, but I’ll have more to say about introspection at another time.

Well, now it’s time for us to take all these centuries of technological advances AND millennia of philosophical reflection and figure out how to share information about ourselves that really matters. Please don’t misinterpret me, I appreciate it when someone posts of photo of something they’re about to eat, especially if they cooked it themselves. I might get invited to a dinner party at their house and so those posts are sort of an online menu of their kitchen. But we can do better. Granted if this were easy, it wouldn’t be so hard. We’ll have to be careful. Still, I’m going to give it a try:

I like to consider myself a warm and caring human being. That said, the phrase, ‘touchy feely’ doesn’t apply to me.  I like my space. So it bothers me that a lot of times, I don’t feel like I get to fully participate in decisions to hug. Occasionally someone will say, “how about a hug?”, but more often they just open up and start to bring it in. By that point it’s often just too late to say no if I care about their feelings, which I almost always do (even though they didn’t care enough to ask, “Mind if we press our fronts together for an undetermined amount of time?”).

I expect there are others out there like me who would like a chance to do some pre hug exploration, you know verbally. I know this might strike some as cold or stiff but it’s not like I’m turning the hug into something that requires informed consent, the process of carefully evaluating the risks and benefits of an activity before engaging in it. But actually that doesn’t sound too bad. Sharing this aspect of myself is starting to generate ideas. I wonder how the the hug consent process would look?I explore in my next post.

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On Putting Others at Ease

I’d like to share a little lesson I gained from meditating. Not an epiphany acquired from a quiet mind, just something unexpected that happened while sitting.

It was my first morning at home after being away in California with my wife for several days. Having just finished writing notes about the trip, it seemed the perfect time to get some Headspace before moving onto a different project.

I closed the door to my office. But before I could sit back down our sixteen year old tomcat began meowing from the hallway, reminding me not only that we had been away, but that he had recently been quite ill with a kidney infection.

Part of what attracts me to the meditation app Headspace is the emphasis Andy Puddicombe puts on the well being of others. So how could I clear my mind knowing that a skinny little tabby with chronic kidney disease was suffering on the other side of the door? All he wanted was to sit on my lap.

I figured that this once I could meditate with him on me. I might even find more clarity, knowing I was putting Kobe at ease. For, on top of our recent absence, and his recovery from illness, the cat was extra stressed out by the presence of strangers in the house right then.

A pair of contractors were upstairs fixing a section of our kitchen cabinets coming loose from the wall. I had answered all their questions. They were busy but not loud. I was only going to get busier and was scheduled to work later in the afternoon. If I was going to meditate that day, now was my only chance.

Kobe got settled in my lap, and I started to clear my mind. I checked in with the different parts of my body to get a sense of how I felt before turning my curiosity toward my breath. I let distractions come and go, just like Andy suggests. Then I heard footsteps down the stairs, followed by the cabinet guy calling my name. I couldn’t let that go, it conflicted with my focus on the well being of others.

Here’s where things got weird, or I made them weird. I came out of my office holding Kobe. The contractor stared at me, with what I interpreted as a slight sneer. My focus on the well being of others was so strong that I started putting all sorts of thoughts in his head. In fact, I had driven all thought from my mind and was only thinking his thoughts. What is this weirdo doing behind his closed door with his cat? I thought he thought. And I assumed he heard some part of Andy’s guiding voice in the meditation for the day.

Of course, because my thoughts were gone it didn’t occur to me that our cabinet guy may have thought nothing of the fact I had my door closed. Presumably I wanted to shut out the noise of their prying and hammering.

Instead I tried to explain away what I thought looked odd and in the process must have looked quite odd.

I started rambling about how I was meditating. I’m not sure, but I may have described all the benefits I get from it, and that I listen to an app on my phone. But, I know for sure that I explained that I didn’t usually do it with a cat on my lap, but this little guy had recently been ill and I wanted to comfort him. I sensed the repairman’s opinion of me shift in a negative direction. He just wanted to know where the breaker box was so he could cut power to some lights mounted beneath one of the cabinets and get back to work.

I showed him. He went back to work, but I did not go back to meditating right then. A little later he called me upstairs and showed me that the cabinets themselves were broken. He didn’t think he could repair them; they needed replacement. He didn’t think it safe to mount it back on the wall, either. He was done.

We’ve since hired someone else to remodel our kitchen. Our new contractor says the cabinet can be repaired. I can’t help but think that I made the original repairman feel so weird, so uncomfortable with my disclosure, that he looked for any reason possible to finish the job and get out of the house of the man who meditates with cats (sounds like a cool name for a modern Native American who spent time in India during a “Beatles phase”).

Emptying your head of thought, not by direct effort, but just letting go, is a great way to let in new perspectives, insights, or just peace. But I must avoid replacing those thoughts with what I presume to be the thinking of others. After some reflection,  I really doubt I freaked this guy out too much. I think I just freaked myself out – I rarely discuss meditating with anyone and suddenly I’m telling a stranger that I was sitting with my cat? I’m just glad that our little tabby doesn’t understand English, or he would have been terribly embarrassed for me.

 

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Happiness TM

 

Happiness TM is a satire about how society might change if someone wrote a self help book that worked. The main character is cynical self help book editor, from whose sour, often misanthropic point of view the events seem horrific. The book is funny throughout with a compelling story line. The characters are vividly portrayed, but none are especially unique. It reads quickly, and I found myself looking forward to cracking it open whenever time allowed.

A brief recommendation, perhaps in a blog, on the Guardian website lead me to Happiness TM. I was drawn to the storyline because I have wondered a lot about the central question. Ferguson does a great job of provoking thought about the nature of contentment, satisfaction, and motivation, without getting too bogged down in philosophy or psychology. He freely admits in the introduction that his is no expert on these issues.

After certain basic material needs are met, true happiness must lie inside, through self-knowledge, acceptance, and appreciation of others. The principles, the knowledge has been with us for a long time, but aren’t we afraid of it? These principles have been with us a long time, so why haven’t we put them in practice? Ferguson describes people who read the book as if they turn to zombies. Their expressions of joy and contentment are vacant, with the life draining out of them.

Happiness TM can be seen as a critique of boosterism, of those who are relentlessly positive and upbeat. I’m a fairly positive person, and it made me want to dial it back some. The dialogue is sharp, but many of the characters wind up sounding similar. And some of the jokes become repetitive pretty quickly. But this is all acceptable because the book works perfectly as a satire.

Happiness TM and my new novel, Forgive and Take, share some general similarities of concept. My story is about the beginning of a social movement. Mike Hinton, the main character, introduces a system that will help people understand each other, and then treat each other better. Think of all the seemingly preventable problems that could be solved. But what would that create? Life without conflict, without tension?

I have often wondered if fear of boredom is a reason people don’t solve seemingly simple problems among themselves. Obviously it is often more complicated – matters of greed, selfishness, and tribalism. We will probably learn that the process of figuring them out is more important than any end result. Nevertheless, utopian scenarios are much less attractive to read and write about than dystopian, presumably because they are boring. But as I explore ideas in Forgive and Take, I try to create some tension around the unknown. That once we learn to overcome boring old social problems, which we’ve had solutions to for a long time without implementing them, then we will be exposed to a whole new series of more challenging problems. Won’t those be more exciting than updated versions of betrayal, bullying, and stealing?