NaBloPoMo 2006

Throughout human history naming has been one of the most basic powers a human being could seize. We see it in religious literature where we are told “So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”¹ We see it as we watch children learn about the world around them as they grasp intuitively that in order to have their desires fulfilled they will need to name the objects they want.

Politics shows us very clearly that being able to name gives one control over the debate. After all, how many people who classify themselves as “pro-life” also support the death penalty and, by definition, negate their stance as being “pro-life?” BushCo. is famous for appearing to change tactics while only changing language (Did Rumsfeld really try to change it from the “war on terrorism” to the “struggle against violent extremism” or did we just imagine that?)².

Economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner maintain that names migrate through society based on socio-economic status³ and that a child’s name can affect his or her success in later in life. Not, they say, based on the name itself but more because parents in socio-economic circumstances that provide fewer opportunities to their children are more likely to choose certain names than parents in circumstances with more opportunities for education.³ To put it more bluntly: poor parents choose names that sound poor while rich parents choose names that society regards as unusual but upscale until they filter down through the rest of the socio-economic scale and fall out of favor.

Having gone to high school in an environment where there were at least three guys named Michael (always called Mike) in each of my six daily classes, not to mention the minimum two Katherines (Kate, Kat, or Katie), and being graced with a given name that does not lend itself to nicknaming I’ve always wondered how powerful it must make someone feel to be able to choose her name.

Online identities, like the one under which I write this blog, offer people the opportunity to create an identity for themselves that matches their self perceptions. Of course, unlike offline nicknames, online identities also offer people the chance to hide and create a smoke screen, to pretend to be something they really aren’t.

Which leads me to the question, why is it that some people attract nicknames and others don’t? Is it a function of the people with whom someone socializes? Is it a function of personality? Or is it just luck that some people end up with the opportunity to choose their own names?

No answers, just questions to ponder as life changes and the world reforms yet again.

Notes:

1. Book of Genesis [Revised Standard Version], Chapter 2, Verse 19, Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, Fordham University
2. New name for ‘war on terror’, Matthew Davis, July 27, 2005, BBC News
3. “Trading Up: Where do baby names come from?“, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, April 12, 2005, Slate.com
4. “A Roshanda by Any Other Name: How do babies with super-black names fare?“, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, April 11, 2005, Slate.com

If my personal pattern from the last couple of years had held, I’d have about 46,000 words of a novel today. As it is I’ve got a raging sinus infection and no ideas for commentary on the beginning of the gluttony Christmas season. So, I bring you a mash up of questions and thoughts that just haven’t evolved into things meriting a full blog entry.

When will Thanksgiving become politically incorrect?

With obesity being described as a “global epidemic” how long do you really think it will be before Thanksgiving becomes an unacceptable holiday in American culture? It is, after all, an entire holiday dedicated to overeating despite all the publicity about giving thanks for the people in our lives, for their health and good fortune.

Why is it that the big guys are all so damn pokey?

My friends Steve and Jim are 6’4″ and 6’5″, respectively, and I love going out in public with them. At 5’9″ with a healthy build standing around with them is the only time I ever feel even vaguely petite or feminine. They are, however, two of the pokiest walkers I’ve ever met, just lollygagging along to a point where even I feel hobbled. I asked Jim about this once and his reply was that he’d gotten used to slowing down for those of us with less vertical lift.

Is it just me or is the umbrella the most useless thing ever invented?

Seriously, they only work if it rains straight down and there’s no wind, which it never, ever does and there always is. And even in the event of a weather singularity where it does just rain straight down the umbrella does nothing for blowback from your shoes as you walk so you still end up wet from about mid-calf down. So…umbrellas: good for when it’s raining straight down, there’s no wind and you’re standing absolutely still.

They’ll tell you that we only have the five senses (sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch). Culturally the “sixth sense” is often used to represent perception of things that we can not grasp with the standard five, things like precognition or the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead. I think we do have a sixth sense but that everyone is wrong about what it is.

The sixth sense is memory.

I smelled my ex-girlfriend on the street the other day. It wasn’t really her; in fact, the woman who smelled like her looked nothing like Aimee. Yet, one whiff of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door perfume and all the memories, both good and bad, came rushing back.

There was the time at the Copa in New York (yes, that Copa) during the 25th anniversary of Stonewall celebrations when the crowd parted and there she was, standing at the top of the stairs leading to the dance floor scanning the room for me her face lighting up in a huge smile when she finally saw me.

There was the time we decided to stay in, order pizza and watch a movie. She fell asleep with me spooned against her back, my arm around her waist, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand. The movie was Orlando and for reasons I still don’t fully understand I don’t think there was a time during our relationship when I loved her more than right at that moment.

Then there was the time I got called by the ex’s name in a particularly awkward situation. Yeah, that left a mark and I’ll definitely never forget the way the linens smelled, suffused with the scent she’d dab behind her ears and on her wrists.

Memory is an amalgam, like love, made up of both perception from the senses and interpretation based on previous experience, knowledge, wish fulfillment, desire, and self-delusion (OK, maybe only love includes that last one; a much longer debate I think). Sound, music in particular, has the ability to take you right back to a specific scenario complete with feelings and physical reactions.

The song that was on during an especially memorable romantic encounter or the one that was on the radio on the way home from the funeral of someone you loved deeply can bring back feelings that you thought you’d processed, forgotten, left behind, and bring them back with the same force they had when you first experienced them.

Yet, the song itself, the actual recording, has not changed. More interestingly, that same song can mean something completely different to the person sitting right next to you.

True, certain musical cues spur certain neuro-emotional responses – minor keys indicate sadness while consistent use of low tones trigger the fight or flight reaction – and the lyrics to a song can tell a story or set a mood but if you’ve associated that song with a particular point in time or event that mood goes beyond the text itself and becomes something more through your interpretation.

Smell, obviously, can do the same thing. Associative memories of cooking can take you back to pre-conscious memory childhood. One of my mother’s earliest memories, in fact, is sitting under the kitchen table while my grandmother made spaghetti sauce and listened to Madame Butterfly on the radio. My mother guesses she was probably about 2.5 years-old at the time.

The smell of baking sugar cookies always makes me think of Christmas. I can not slice a lime without at least brushing up against the memory of stealing fresh ones off a tree planted in the courtyard of a local office complex in the neighborhood where we lived in northern California when I was 9 years-old.

The smell of fresh bread on the air makes me think not of “Mom” and “home” but of summer early mornings when the sun shines bright with the promise of heat to come and new leaves turn on the tree branches because it is in the early summer that the industrial bakery in the neighborhood where I now live switches from day baking to overnight baking.

Let’s not even think about what spending my childhood growing up in the same neighborhood as a Frito plant did for my view of snack foods (thanks, I’ll skip the Frito pie). And, of course, there is the aforementioned perfume example.

Is the same true of color or texture, things that are perceived by sight or touch? Even though I don’t have many (and more to the point, none that I care to share here) memories of that type I would venture to say yes. It only stands to reason that information, text, taken in through those senses at particular points in time could have the same affect as smell or sound.

I’ve been avoiding a lot of my CD collection lately for a variety of reasons, chief among them is that much of what is in it reminds me of a friendship that I still feel I am on the verge of losing. It’s been nearly a year since my uncle died yet I can’t bring myself to watch Casablanca which was his favorite movie and one that I enjoy both as a movie in itself and as a film geek but also because it has always reminded me of him.

The question then becomes, how to reform these memories? Is it a simple matter of associating those cues with new memories?

I don’t think so. I want to hope so, but because it involves both external and internal elements, memory is a slippery thing, uncontrollable yet malleable at the same time. Something to think about as I try to be more careful how deeply I inhale in public from now on.

Most famous for her work on death and dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined the seven stages of grief as

1. Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
2. Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
3. Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
4. Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
5. Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
6. Testing stage: Seeking realistic solutions.
7. Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward.

As mental and other health professionals began to pay more attention to the grief process they realized that not only does the terminally ill patient go through these stages but so does the patient’s family and, indeed, anyone who is experiencing a loss that she perceives to merit grief – losing a job, moving, breaking up with someone, dissolution of a friendship – all of these situations trigger this cycle of emotions.

These stages are perceived, at least in popular culture and certainly by some mental health professionals, as discrete periods of time. Indeed, mental health professionals view cycling among the stages as a form of avoidance in coping with the reality of the new situation. My perspective is a little different.

See, just because you find a way forward, whether that way forward is finally deleting the deceased’s office phone number from your cell phone contacts list or figuring out where you’re going to have the family dinner that was traditionally hosted by the deceased, doesn’t mean that you stop feeling any of the shock that the person is gone or any of the anger over the unfairness of it or any of the sadness that goes with the lack of that person in your life. I think you still feel them, you just feel them less acutely in the same way you learn to live with the chronic, low-grade pain of a torqued out joint or a pinched nerve that’s taking way too long to heal. It hurts, just not as much all the time.

My uncle Chuck would have been 60 today. So, discrete stages be damned. Yeah, I’ve accepted that he’s gone but that doesn’t mean I’m any less pissed off about it.