Category Archives: Epictetus said…

May 23, 2009 · 5:56 pm

Tom Wolfe Knows


Yeah, we all know Tom Wolfe can do social satire; but until I read A Man in Full I didn’t know he could do chilling urban anthropology [Note to Self: Try not to go to jail in Alameda County.], Stoic philosophy, and more compelling redemptive narrative than Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment. I shall quote from the chapter, “Epictetus Comes to Da House.” Our hapless hero, Conrad [picture Steve Buscemi], through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, finds himself locked up in the Santa Rita pokey [in all senses of the word], clueless how to survive. N Aff [see “The Lone Wolf” post] is the only code of conduct, and Conrad can’t find a reference group. He gets the “wrong” book sent to him–The Stoics instead of The Stoics’ Game–but discovers that Epictetus [an ancient Greek, sold into Roman slavery by his parents, who when freed became a philosopher] knows a thing or two about enduring unfair captivity. When Conrad is cornered by a Very Bad Man whose aggressive subtext is clear, he channels the wisdom of Epictetus [who says we all must die of something, sometime, but we can try to do it with our character intact]. To his own chagrin, Conrad slips into the idiom of an “Oakland homey,” [when in Rome, and all…] and tells the bully, “Hey, brother, look! You a number in here, and I’m a number in here…see…and I ain’t tryin’a disrespectchoo none…I ain’t tryin’a sweatchoo none, play you none, dog you none, or get over on you none…so ain’ no cause for nobody be playin’ me or doggin’ me or runnin’ a game on me, neither.” To find out what happens next, buy the book.

Let’s notice how much Phatic speech Conrad uses. Always a good idea, when addressing strangers, or those acting strange. A young boy’s Phatic communication once saved my life in Boston. I was on the escalator at the Back Bay train station, wearing a long, flowing muffler, when I heard the cryptic words: “Goy Lee! Goy Lee! Ya skaaf! Ya skaaf!” I deciphered this as: “Girlie! Girlie! Your scarf! Your scarf!” I then realized that I was the “Girlie,” about to do an Isadora Duncan [choke myself by getting my muffler caught in the machinery]. I yanked the flowing tail up, and shouted back, “Oh, yeah, t’anks a million, dere!” [When in Boston, and all…] If he had just yelled, “Ya skaaf! Ya skaaf!” I’da been none da wiser, an’ needin’ a wake, surely.

Also notice that Conrad is putting out the “subway subtext” [see the “Walk on the Wild Side” post]: “I am not your victim, but I am not your enemy.” Who knew, when my acting friends and I were busy devising this cool-as-a-cucumber response, that Epictetus had been there and done that 2000 years before us?

As valuable as witty ripostes and/or Stoic replies are, in the face of aggressive provocations, they do not always serve. There are, sadly, times–in my opinion and even that of Epictetus–that the appropriate response to aggression is aggression.

That’s for another post.

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Filed under aggression happens, Epictetus said..., phatic communication, reference group

May 25, 2009 · 7:01 pm

Albert Ellis Knew, Too


I promise, we’ll get to the permissible aggression–just not yet. First, we should exhaust [or at least explore] all alternative responses. Albert Ellis, who died on 24 July 2007 at the age of 93, was annoying as hell. Ask anyone who knew him, including the woman he lived with for 37 years, Janet Wolfe. Because he was a graduate of our program @ Columbia, he used to drop by and try to incite us to fury, mostly succeeding. Even so, I feel lucky to have sat in his presence. He is known as the father of Rational-Emotive Therapy, which [I now realize, having come to Epictetus via Tom Wolfe] is based almost entirely on Stoic philosophy. I shall paraphrase him closely [but you must imagination his whiny, nasal voice]: “We talk to ourselves in short, declarative sentences. We say, ‘I am a cat in a sack; and that is awful!’ That is not awful–it is only highly inconvenient.“

As it happens, we were weighing Zanzibar, to calculate his proper dosage of flea & tick meds. He wasn’t in the sack 30 seconds. Also, despite the expression on his face in this picture, out of the 16 cats I have owned, he is the most laid-back, seemingly oblivious to the notion of humiliation. When Napster’s turn in the “sack-scale” came, he was, as usual, overcome with fear. Ruth–the 19-year-old, 5-pound Maine Coon–was soaking up BTUs under one of our few remaining incandescent lights; and because her weight has remained constant for almost two decades, she was spared the intrusion into her nap time. Now, be honest with yourself. Do you enjoy public weigh-ins? What gets up your nose about them? Realistically, only jockeys, pugillists and military personnel are likely to face the pain & suffering of job loss, in connection with avoirdupois. Let’s say your doctor hectors you, “If you don’t lose some weight, you’re going to die!” You can reply with the words of Epictetus: “When did I ever say I was immortal?” So good old Dr. Ellis would have you reason with your aroused amygdala, in the face of an impending weigh-in, “I may have put on a couple pounds; but that is not awful. It is only highly inconvenient.” Thus, you should experience less anger, dump less cortisol, and spare your body additional adipose deposits. [I must say, Albert was a trim fellow.]

As with this trivial example, so with much of life: the Stoics and their modern descendants, the Cognitive-Behavioral Theorists, would have us believe that the acting out of aggressive impulses can–and should–be avoided in most instances. We cannot control other people’s actions; but we can strive to control our own emotional reactions to them. My favorite adjunct professor would ask rhetorically, after making a seemingly absolute pronouncement, “Always?” and then answer his own question, either “Always,” or “Not always.” So, Epictetus, Tom Wolfe, and I would answer, as to whether we should always maintain our equanimity, “Not always.”

Oh, yay! We sometimes get to resort to violence! [“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”] When? Epictetus offers one specific circumstance: one must never “ignore cries for help from a friend under assault from robbers.” Less specifically, he opines, “Just as a target is not set up in order to be missed, so evil is no natural part of the world’s design.” Hmm. That seems to cover alot of territory. Since we’re supposed to love and accept the “Natural,” but hate the “Unnatural,” anything any one of us finds “unnatural” could be considered “evil”; and we’re allowed to oppose it, with violence, if necessary. This is where Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches would point out to our ancient Greco-Roman philosopher, that what is “unnatural” is largely a matter of geography. There is–and has been, since way before Epictetus was teaching–a variance in climates, native flora & fauna, and resulting folkways, that inform one’s beliefs as to what is “natural” and “unnatural.” We can’t all be Mediterraneans, ya know.

So, alas, we are back to “When in Rome, do as the Romans…unless you are Greek, and despise the Romans…” This is where ethologists point out, we evolved with an amygdala for a reason–to help us [and those within our reference group] survive. Sometimes, the amygdala is not simply “barking mad”–to be overruled by reason, cognitive reframing and Stoicism. Sometimes, the right thing to do is cry “Havoc!”

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Filed under body image, Epictetus said..., pro bono publico, reference group, stress and cortisol

June 10, 2009 · 3:05 pm

Don’t Look Now


“Good eye contact” is entirely overrated. “Look at me when I’m talkin’ to you!” Why? What if I’m one of the 50% of people who process information auditorially, rather than visually, and looking at you just distracts me from what you’re saying? What if I grew up in another culture, where staring directly at my interlocutor [particularly one higher in the pecking order] is the height of bad manners? Even in our own military, when standing to Attention, one is taught to stare “into middle distance,” not into the eyes of the Big Wig addressing one, even when answering questions. In the Navy, it is called “keeping one’s eyes in the boat.” [One is also taught to speak in the third–not second–person: “Would the Admiral care for…?”]

And don’t get me started on prey animals–such as horses–one is handling. Direct eye contact is an amygdalar trigger, provoking “highly inconvenient” reactions, ranging from bolting away to charging the handler. [Remember the Spanish Riding School scenario? Probably started with a stare.] Seasoned stable lads [a unisex term], equine vets, and farriers know to avert their gaze when approaching a horse, as if it were a Roman Senator. [Trivia question: Which emperor was deposed for appointing his horse, Incitatus, a Consul?]

Predators know the fierce power of a direct stare, and use it strategically. Dog spies rabbit; fixes it with a stare; and rabbit [most likely] freezes, at least momentarily. Think back to the dog fights in Top Gun, where the prey jet is “painted” with the laser of the predator, indicating “I’ve got you in my sights now. You’re toast.” Back in the 1920s, before eye contact was considered an Altogether Good Thing, there was a New Yorker cartoon, with two women walking past a man in the street: “He gave me such a look!” The joke is that she is feigning indignation, while secretly enjoying being “in his sights.”

Let’s consider the hard-done-by black & white dog in Dr. Range’s experiment on Inequity Aversion. We know he is angry at the injustice of his pal [Black & Tan] continuing to receive a reward for giving a paw, while he gets bupkes, nowt, Nichts! He demonstrates his displeasure by going on strike [no longer giving his paw], and by averting his gaze–not just from Black & Tan, but also from the experimenter. What’s up with that? Here’s my theory. Like Conrad in the Santa Rita jail, he knows he is “just a number here,” and Black & Tan is “just a number here.” It is not really Black & Tan’s fault that The Man [a unisex term] is being arbitrary and unfair. His beef is actually with The Man, who is the established Pack Leader. [Remember, this is the Clever Dog Lab–ain’t no slow learners here.] Back in the world [as GIs used to say in ‘Nam], he would be able express his anger in a number of ways: attacking The Man [fight], high-tailing it out of there [flight], or going into the “suspended animation” state which Object Relations Theorists call Somnolent Detachment. Here, his options are limited. Attacking The Man is not a clever move, since the Pack Leader is the source of basic rations, not just treats. So, to lessen his temptation to do so, he avoids “fixing The Man in his sights.” If his amygdala is really ramped up, he may actually go into Somnolent Detachment. When human infants do this, they “stare right past” their caregiver, as if she weren’t even there.

This is Crazy-Like-a-Fox behavior: the lesser of two evils. “If you slight me, I’ll ignore you. You have more power than me, but you don’t own my spirit [soul, what have you].” It is a gutsy move, whether you are a clever dog at the University of Vienna, or a PoW near the River Kwai. One has to do it with enough dignity and Stoicism, NOT to be mistaken for a Lame Gazelle. This little dog’s sit-down strike and averted gaze carries the subtext message: “I am not your victim, but I am not your enemy.”

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Filed under Epictetus said..., ethology, lesser of two evils, limbic system, semiotics

August 9, 2009 · 5:29 pm

"Summat Chronic!"


Remember the British expression for a fleeting affliction–“summat and nowt”? Well, if that affliction lingers, it turns into “summat chronic,” an idiom which has morphed into a set of verbal twins [one good, one evil]. Thus, I could tell Lili the dog, “Girl, I luv you summat chronic!”; or most of the patrons in the vast waiting room at work [which we share with neurologists and Pain Management specialists] could say to one another [especially, if they happen to be from the UK], “Oooh! Me (insert body part) has been playin’ me up summat chronic!”

Given the connection between pain and anger, when the waiting room gets crowded, you can feel the pent-up rage rising. How tempting, to try to replicate the Keele experiment: “On the count of 3, everybody, yell out the expletive of your choice! You’ll feel better!” [Not gonna happen. Wouldn’t provide a longterm solution, anyway.]

The problem with any remedy for pain [be it a barked obscenity or a wallaby-endorsed opiate] is that–to quote a U. of Michigan med school classmate of my husband’s, Herb Malinoff, now the Maven of Pain in Ann Arbor–“When you start taking pain medications, the brain doesn’t like it. The ability to perceive pain is extremely important for survival. Pain keeps you from danger.”

There is an old cultural joke, made famous by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe, in a skit involving one of them trying to communicate with a baffled foreigner. “It’s no use. He doesn’t understand. You’ll have to shout.” Well, that’s the brain’s motto, too. If we don’t acknowledge the “howling wolf” of pain, or if we try to quash it with a pain-killer, the “howling wolf” is going to “throw a strop” [British for pitch a fit], and turn up the volume. “Oy! I’m talkin’ to you! ‘Danger,’ you thick-o! ‘DANGER!'” And so, says Herb, the battle of wills, between the Pain Messenger in our brain and the Pain Manager in our healthcare plan, escalates. The result is often hyperalgesia [hypersensitivity to pain].

So, waddaya gonna do? I shall humbly suggest an approach, based on Victoria Stillwell’s dog training method. When the dog first barks, she says, we should thank it for doing its job. [No doubt, she grew up with the motto, “Why keep a dog and bark, yourself?”] Not that we should literally express gratitude for the pain, mind you, not rejoice in it; but instead of asking the rhetorical, Existential question, “Why me?” [“This is awful!”], try asking the more useful question, “Why now?” [“Cuz this is highly inconvenient. I have other plans.“] Remember my “Always? Not always” prof’s suggestion, to identify the person whose head you’d like to bash in, as a headache remedy? That’s a “Why now?” problem-solving line of inquiry. The cliche, textbook reason for why your hand hurts now, is that you’ve inadvertently laid it on a hot stove. Sometimes, however, the cause and effect are not so proximate. The reason your head hurts now may have to do with what you drank last night. Or that you need an updated correction for your specs. Or that the air in your city is becoming more toxic. The less proximate the cause of your pain, the more inexorable [and hopeless] it seems. [“Note to Self: ‘Become rich enough to move away from New Delhi.'”]

Consider another well-worn motto: “What can’t be cured must be endured.” The next post will deal with non-pharmaceutical methods of coping with pain. Until then, consider Lili’s remedy for emotional stress–her favorite squeaky toy, “Duck”–the foot of whom you see here. She has more than 10 other squeaky toys; but “Duck” is her “Teddy bear.” Whenever she senses bad vibes in the household, or simply wants us all to go to bed so she can quit guarding us, she parades around with “Duck” in her mouth. No doubt, you have a “Teddy bear,” too. When our younger daughter was to have her tonsils out, we were instructed in the pre-op briefing to have her bring her favorite plush animal [“Gus” the cat], who was solemnly given his own scrub cap and who was in her arms from check-in to recovery. Henry Ford Hospital knows a thing or two about helping kids cope with pain, by first helping them cope with fear.

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November 17, 2009 · 7:45 pm

About a Bird


Readers of this blog might have the impression that my mother was only a featured player in our family variety show. That flamboyant Rosie was the star. Indeed, when he was present, he was usually the Top Banana; but he would be the first to declare that my mother was the Class Act.

In telling her story, I shall try to resist the cognitive distortions of Black & White [all or nothing] and catastrophic [“This is awful!”] thinking. But it will be hard. Myrna [Deal with it. She had to.] was a precocious pianist, who began concertizing in Ohio and Washington, DC, in her early teens. She won a national piano contest, the prize for which was a scholarship to The Juilliard School of Music [whence she graduated with a Bachelor of Science (!) degree in 1943]. You are given a main mentor there, and hers was James Friskin [a Bach maven]; but Alexander Siloti [Rachmaninoff’s cousin] also taught there during her Juilliard years.

Now, Mumsley [a silly name my sister & I gave her, about the time our English cat got saddled with Ying Tong] was an elfin little creature: 5’2″ with very small hands. This is crucial to the absolutely true story I am about to relate [which I have fact-checked with my sister and the Internet]. One day in 1954, when we were living in Tarrytown, NY, our parents piled us into the wallowing Buick for a mystery tour, to a sprawling country house in a not-nearby-enough-for-me town [possibly Mt. Pleasant, near Valhalla, where Rachmaninoff is buried]. Myrna had been invited by “some Cousins of Rachmaninoff” [we figure, Siloti’s family], to “show them how she did it.” See, Rachmaninoff has been retrospectively diagnosed with Marfans. He was 6’6″ with huge paws, and wrote music for big-handed folks like himself. Now, whether they had heard her nifty 15-minute wartime radio show, or read a review of a concert she gave featuring the Russian giant, they wanted to watch her in action.

At 5 years old, and already dreading the drive home, I was morose…until the Cousins let fly the parakeets. Talk about chaos! As Myrna was playing, a bird alighted on the temple of her glasses, and stared her in the eye. Trouper that she was, she just kept on playing. “Open your mouth,” invited a Cousin. “He’ll check your teeth.” Myrna smiled, but kept her jaw clenched. When the command performance was over, a Cousin asked if we had a cat. Rosie piped up, “Yes, but we’ll take another, if you’re offering.” “Actually, we were going to offer you ‘Pretty Bird’ [the avian dentist]; but you have a cat.” “We’ll make it work!” assured Rosie; and home we drove, with a blue parakeet, who withstood the aerobatic maneuvers of Chip-Chip the tabby tom [whom you have yet to meet], and later of Alfred the dog, for 6 years, without mishap.

When Myrna was 35 [and I was 10], she got Multiple Sclerosis. The English still call the most rapidly-progressing type [which the cellist Jacqueline du Pre had] “galloping.” Mumsley had “cantering” MS. She continued to play publicly for another 10 years, although she required a wheelchair by then. She died 3 months before my first child was born, at 61 [my age now].

Because she was a Goody-Two-Shoes, teetotalling, sweet-natured person, it is tempting to reduce her life to an ironic cliche: “Virtue is its own punishment.” My sister’s & my fears for her led us to many impatient [angry] outcries of “Oh, Mums-ley!” As if we could shout her back to health. But she never lost patience with us, and not often with herself. She remained the mistress of the deadpan one-liner. The last time I saw her, my in-laws were visiting and she was listening, as always, to the classical music radio station. “Oh, I just love La Traviata!” enthused my mother-in-law. “How ’bout Il Trovatore?” rejoined Mumsley.

A Class Act.

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Filed under catharsis, comic relief, Epictetus said..., limbic system

November 28, 2009 · 6:15 pm

Gratitude


No doubt, most gatherings of family, friends & invited strangers seated around the table on this Thanksgiving were given an opportunity to express their gratitude, either individually or collectively, either sincerely or flippantly [depending on the group demographics]. Whatever was identified as a cause for giving thanks, the very act of doing so [according to Martin Seligman and other mavens of Positive Psychology] did the “thanks-giver” good.

In fact, the more unfortunate and hard-done by an individual is feeling [like Lili on the Penalty Box Rug], the more beneficial it is, to “Accentuate the Positive” [as the lyrics of a Depression-era song advised]. Irony is almost unavoidable, and totally okay, in this exercise. Such as, in the genre of joke that ends “…unless you consider the alternative.” [Usually, being dead.] I wonder if there is, even now, a jolly japester fashioning zombie & vampire jokes in this vein…

As part of my dawn get-ready-to-face-the-day routine, while zoning out for 50 minutes of aerobic exercise [in the convenience & privacy of my basement, for which, I give thanks], my iPod playlist includes at least one tongue-in-cheek [but also sincere] “gratitude” song. For years, it has been a song off of The Holloways’ album, So This Is Great Britain? [“Generator”], the refrain of which is, “May I remind you that you don’t live in poverty? You got your youth, and you got food in your belly.” [Well, c’mon, folks, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, nar’mean?] These days, it tends to be a song off of Paolo Nutini’s 2nd album, Sunnyside Up [“Pencil Full of Lead”], which is a Dixeland-meets-Gilbert & Sullivan-patter-song enumerating the things for which the diminutive Glaswegian son-of-a-fishmonger is grateful, featuring the chorus, “I’ve got food in my belly and a license for my telly.” I feel the BBC should be grateful that young Poalo makes the payment of Britain’s mandatory TV & radio license fee [of 139 pounds, 50 pence, Sterling] sound so fabuloso, with every refrain.

Beyond any metaphysical benefit daily gratitude bestows upon the thanks-giver, at the corporeal level, it blocks the production of cortisol and encourages the production of endorphins. I find it a helpful antidote to the 4 horsemen of what-gets-up-my-nose, on any given day. “It’s 5.15 in the bleedin’ morning, and you’re alive & able-bodied enough to be down here working up a sweat.” [There! Intrusion and pain & suffering neutralized, with one co-ordinate clause.] “While I’m busy here in “the bike room,” Lili is having a barkfest at Arnold, her neighboring German shepherd, thereby adding some joyful chaos to the morning.” [Boom! Intrusion and humiliation re-framed and diminished.]

I could go on, but you get the idea.

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Filed under Epictetus said..., limbic system, stress and cortisol

January 2, 2010 · 4:11 pm

First, Face It, Head-on


By “it,” I mean your loss: of traction, of your wallet, of a Loved One, of your reason for living, whatever. Remember Driver’s Ed, especially those of you from a cold climate? The most counter-intuitive thing to learn [and to convince yourself to do, in the actual situation], is to “steer into a skid.” [Also, pre-ABS, don’t stomp on the brake pedal, just “feather” it.] Yeah, yeah. You’re less likely to “fishtail,” or even “spin right round”; but, by definition, you’re heading in the wrong direction! “Just for a moment, until you regain a bit of forward motion again,” the instructor soothes. Turns out, the same paradigm applies when you’re flying a single-engine airplane and it stalls. Intuition shrieks, “Pull up!” but your instructor says, “Point the nose down, to pick up air speed [and let Bernoulli’s principle lift you up].”

Likewise, the first [and hardest] thing to do when something bad happens to you, is to face it, already. Boy, doesn’t limbic arousal mess wi’dat? Like making the whole thing play out in slow-motion, so that you can kid yourself, “This is just a dream sequence. I’ll wake up in a minute.” I did that when my purse was stolen in London in the ’70s [even though I had lost 3 wallets to pickpockets during my years in Manhattan]. As usual, that time distortion thing has some survival value, allowing you to postpone overwhelming panic [loss of blood flow to the hippocampus] long enough to complete your Flame Out Chart protocol. What’s that? Actual pilots of actual jet planes have a laminated list of steps to take, in case of an engine flame-out [since most jets make lousy gliders & Bernoulli’s principle cannot help them overcome gravity]. It’s written down, because some panic is likely to trickle through to the pilot’s amygdala in that situation [Right Stuff notwithstanding], causing Highly Inconvenient memory loss for “What’s the first thing to do? And the second?” The Naval aviator euphemism for that is “Having a bad day.”

So, assuming you’re not in charge of a disabled aircraft–but still, not everything’s going your way–if you can get yourself to face the bad news real time [not just after the fact], your trusty hippocampus will be able to help you through it: by remembering previously learned recovery protocols, or devising a new one on the spot.

When I faced the fact that my footing was gone for good on the black ice, and I had entered the slo-mo phase of my debacle, I remembered my acting school class [which Chevy Chase must have aced] in safe-but-convincing-stage-falls: “twist to the side, knee, hip, extend arm to protect head, boom.” That’s just how it went down, on the day.

As they say about airplane flights, “Any one you can walk away from, was a good one.”

More of this next time. Meanwhile, this is West Coast Penny, visiting the East Coast for the holidays. Can you tell whether she’s looking away, or facing you, head-on?

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April 6, 2011 · 6:09 pm

Just in case…


The ramshackle buildings of the school my sister & I attended in the 60s, in Bushy Park, Greater London [in transit to which, we passed by Hampton Court Palace], had served as Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, where Ike & the Yanks hammered Gen. Sir Frederick E. Morgan’s plan, “Operation Overlord,” into a viable strategy for the invasion of Europe. The Kindergarten classroom had been the erstwhile “Eisenhower Room.”

By March 1961, JFK had succeeded Ike as President, and inherited from him the never-viable plan, “Operation Pluto,” for a CIA-caper [the invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro counter-revolutionaries], known since its spectacular failure as “The Bay of Pigs.” Two days before the debacle, Radio Moscow, in an English language broadcast aimed at listeners in the UK, had predicted such an “adventure” [and its failure]. So too, it turns out, had the British Ambassador to the US, warning that UK intelligence sources advised that the Cuban populace were overwhelmingly pro-Castro; and they were likely to meet an intrusion onto their soil with hostility, not joy & gratitude. Nobody @ the CIA passed his message along to JFK, though.

We & our Bushy Park classmates [most of whose parents worked in or for the US military in London] were humiliated at our nation’s fiasco, and terrified by Moscow’s predicted anti-NATO ballistic retaliation [since the UK was likely to be their proxy whipping-boy]. Almost to a child, we became Nihilists, refusing to do our homework, since “What’s the point? We’re all going to be blown to smithereens by the Russians, anyway.”

So our beloved teachers, most of whom had been through the London Blitz about 20 years earlier, gathered us together and shared their experiences of Back in the Day, when actual bombs were actually falling [not just maybe, mind], every night, sometimes on friends & family, before the Yanks condescended to become Allies. “Of course we all thought about giving up,” they said. “How trivial & pointless homework seemed, when London was burning every night. But, if we hadn’t just kept on doing it, we wouldn’t have been able to go on to University and become your teachers, now would we? And where would you be then, eh?”

Concrete, but compelling role-modelling, is what they offered us. Not any of your “Not to worry. Everything is going to turn out fine.” Just the Existential question, “What if we don’t all get blown to smithereens? Maybe it would be best to have done your homework, JUST IN CASE (of survival).

So we pulled ourselves together and did our homework.

Zanzibar is sitting in a Flight Bag [also known as a Chart Case], which pilots always carry with them, even to this day, so that if their more sophisticated methods of navigation “go down,” they can still figure out where to land safely. Just in case.

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February 13, 2012 · 10:04 pm

No Polar Bears’ Picnic


It’s been such a freakishly mild winter, so far, that I plumb forgot to put Lili’s snow boots on this weekend, for our walk in the Smithsonian woods. Here she is with Chris, just before [and after] flinging herself down on her stomach, to dramatize, “Large, painful snowballs have formed in the impractically luxuriant fur between my toes; and I can’t walk another step until you pull them out!” What was up her nose was unmistakably pain & suffering.

What was up my nose was the humiliation of having, through my silly mistake, inflicted needless discomfort on my trusting pet. What was up Chris’ nose was the intrusion of having to stop so often to perform the snow removal ceremony on Lili’s paws. “Tatsu” [to get her to stand up from her flung-down-dog position]; then “Su wa te” [to get her to sit down]; then “Gimme a paw” [well, you get it…].

And so as we made our halting way through our beloved woods, I chanted in my head Albert Ellis’ mantra [“This situation is not awful; it is only highly inconvenient.”], until we encountered our old nemeses: the girl with the unleashed retriever. Figuring that Lili’s limbic system was even more lit up than usual, Chris dragged her off the path into the trees, where she barked & lunged, embarrassingly but harmlessly, as the runner and her [short-haired] dog passed by, unhindered by snowballs between the toes, apparently.

But, as they say in the UK, worse was to follow! A few hundred yards later, we encountered an older woman running [sine cane]; and Lili gave her the full bark & lunge routine, just for nothing. The lady, whose limbic system was the least aroused of any of us, remarked cheerfully, “He’s lucky to be wearing a warm fur coat on a day like this!”

Later, on the ride home, Chris remarked, “I was afraid Lili would pull me off my feet back there!” [Welcome to my world, even when it’s only muddy underfoot.]

So, what’s it all about, then? Despite daily training exercises, to gain mastery over the howling wolf in Lili’s head [and, ahem, mine], we are still very much a work in progress. But wallowing in humiliation about it only adds fuel to the limbic fire [and more resulting anger]. The best thing to do is to use the cheerful lady in the woods as a role model: to Keep Calm & Carry On.

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Filed under aggression happens, attribution theory, Epictetus said...

May 12, 2012 · 7:49 pm

“Offensive and tasteless”? Moi?

Well, I did ask. This wasn’t a random insult flung at me as I walked the streets of SoHo in the rain. If it had been, my not-your-victim-not-your-enemy rejoinder would have been: [in New York] “Yeah, that’s kinda what I was going for”; [in London, channeling my Irish grandma] “Aww, go on wit’ yez!”

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I have been a member of The British Psychological Society since the 70s, and therefore a regular reader of their monthly periodical, The Psychologist, which makes the following blandishments to its readers: “We rely on your submissions, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience….The editorial team are very supportive, and it is a great way of communicating your work and opinions to other psychologists.” So, I decided to be brave & shoot an email to the Managing Editor, briefly describing my blog’s premise & purpose and embedding my new web address. That was last Monday. On the Wednesday morning, just before heading off to work, I received the following reply:

“Hi, Unfortunately our work internet categorises it as ‘offensive and tasteless’ and therefore won’t let me view it! Shame, it sounds interesting. Cheers, Jon”

To say that “I was gobsmacked,” is probably the kind of offensive & tasteless [hereinafter abbreviated to O & T] term to which the bps [their own abbreviation] objects; but I was. I deployed every amygdala-mediating technique written about in my blog, to avoid a road accident on my way to the medical center [where I work. Not the ER. Let’s not over-dramatize]. Later, I phoned my sister, the head librarian @ a Med School & hospital, to ask her what manner of firewall my blog may have hit; and she sent me an article about Filtering by Statistical Classification computer programs [FSC], which are used “to determine what content is or is not acceptable.”

Hurrah! A way out of my humiliation, at having been summarily dissed & dismissed as an O & T purveyor of filth! My wit & wisdom had simply been lost in translation, by an Artificial Intelligence language analysis program which was stymied by my [over]use of the Poetic Speech Function. All that quoting of rock lyrics and slang expressions…the literal-minded computer program just couldn’t cope. For a New York minute, I even considered changing the title of my most recent post…until I remembered the dictum of Epictetus. All we have in this life is our character. If we start selling out to avoid the censure of others, we will lose that.

So, I sent the editor another email that afternoon, explaining my “lost in translation” theory, and assuring him that, although I wrote about the dark side of human nature, my intent was pro bono publico. In the silence that has ensued, other ways of viewing “what went down” in the original email exchange have occurred to me. After watching the latest episode of Sherlock, “Scandal in Belgravia,” I realized that my high-frequency use of humiliation and, to a lesser extent, pain & suffering, might lead an FSC program to conclude that mine was an S & M website. Well, at least that removed any temptation to alter what I’ve written. Without the 4 precursors of anger, no GotWolf blog.

Then I took my own advice: “Consider the source,” and found out the following things about the Managing Editor.  First of all, and rather trivially, he was a Boy Scout. Therefore, presumably, if he had really found it a “shame” [kind of a Freudian slip, I’d say] that the “work network” wouldn’t “let” him view my blog, which he thought “sounds interesting,” he would have been resourceful enough to stroll down the road to the nearest Internet cafe and borrow a hipster’s laptop for a few minutes, to check out my website for himself.

Second, and more salient, his own Award Winning 1999 Doctoral Research is entitled “Bullies – Thugs or Thinkers?” To quote from his Abstract, “The public, the media, even psychologists: all have a tendency to stigmatise and pathologise individuals involved in threatening behavior as psychologically and socially abnormal or deficient. But is bullying a pathological behavior found only in a minority, or is it in fact a common identity choice actively chosen at certain times because it makes sense in certain social environments? Are the children involved inadequate, or could they be considered socially competent…even superior?”

I wonder if anyone from a certain Presidential campaign reads this blog?  If not, “shame.” They might find today’s post “interesting.”

 

 

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Filed under aggression happens, attribution theory, Epictetus said..., pro bono publico, semiotics