Dark Energy

Like most people, I don’t know a whole lot about physics. I took a physics course as an undergraduate, learned the material well enough to earn an A, and then promptly forgot pretty much everything. I remember a few basic principles. For instance, I remember that force = mass x acceleration and that the total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant over time. Pretty good for an English major, huh? Still, I’m disappointed that I didn’t work to retain more of what I’d learned because I find physics super fascinating, though maybe not for the same reasons that physicists find physics fascinating. I’m not drawn to physics so much because I want to understand the mechanics of the universe (although this is certainly intriguing) as because it is an especially rich source of metaphors.

A pretty commonplace example of what I’m talking about is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that thermal energy (i.e., heat) always flows from areas of higher temperature to areas of lower temperature. For example, when I add ice cubes to a cup of warm water, the warm water seeps into the ice cubes and causes them to melt. As this happens, the water molecules inside the ice cubes become less organized and begin to move around more freely. As I understand it, entropy describes this movement from order to chaos. Admittedly, this is probably grossly simplistic if not just plain old wrong. I am, after all, an English major. But anyway, my point is that entropy is often used metaphorically by people to explain why the kitchen is a mess two hours after they cleaned it or why their husband doesn’t look as appealing as he did ten years ago. Metaphorically speaking, entropy simply means that things fall apart.

Lately I’ve been tripping out about dark energy. Again, what I’m about to say is going to be at least rudimentary if not totally wrong, but this is my blog and I’ll be a schlemiel if I want to. In physics class, I learned that space is malleable and can be bent and warped by objects within it. For instance, the mass of our sun creates a dent in the space around it, which is what keeps the planets in our solar system in orbit. Basically, the earth is slowly falling into the sun. This is what we call gravity.

(FYI: This is where I’m probably going to really start messing things up)

For a long time, it seemed like the only kind of gravity at work in the universe was this “pulling” kind, which raised the question, what’s to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself? So Einstein did a whole bunch of fancy math and came up with something called the cosmological constant, which (I think) suggests that empty space contains just the right amount of energy to counteract the gravitational pull produced by all the matter in the universe. Anyhow, the end result of all this math was a static universe that neither expands nor contracts but remains the same size.

But then this guy named Hubble figured out that space is actually expanding outward. To make a long story short, this outward expansion was eventually attributed to a massive explosion, which later came to be known as the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang, all the energy in the universe was concentrated in a singularity of infinite density and infinite temperature. After the Big Bang, all of the stuff in the universe expanded outward rapidly, becoming significantly less dense and a lot less hot. The force of this explosion was sufficient to counteract the gravitational pull of the matter within the universe and keep it moving outward. According to this theory, one of two things would ultimately happen: either the gravitational pull produced by all the matter in the universe would eventually exceed the force of the explosion and the universe would contract back in on itself, or the universe would continue to expand until all the bodies were so far apart that they were no longer affected by one another’s gravitational pull. In this second version of events, the speed of the universe’s expansion would eventually slow down and the bodies within the universe would just kinda drift apart, getting colder and colder as they lost thermal energy.

But then, scientists figured out that the speed at which the universe is expanding is actually increasing. This doesn’t make any sense. Remember entropy? The force of an explosion – even a really, really big explosion – should actually decrease as energy is lost in waste heat. Unless more energy is added. So here’s where dark energy comes in. Apparently, Einstein once speculated that there was another, counterbalancing force in the universe – a push to counteract the pull of gravity – but he abandoned this idea because he couldn’t figure out what this force might be. Well now, around one hundred years later, physicists have decided this repelling force exists and they are calling it “dark energy.”

The fascinating thing about dark energy is that, as of yet, no one has actually observed it. It is, as Columbia professor Brian Greene describes it, “a diffuse, invisible energy permeating space.” So as far as I can tell, dark energy is just the name that physicists have given to a force they don’t yet understand but whose effects they’ve been able to measure and observe.

I really, really like this. And now that I’ve finished delivering my primitive and probably totally erroneous lesson on physics, I get to tell you why I like it so much. Yippee!

To begin with, the term “dark energy” is itself evocative. It bespeaks of mystery, the unknown, things that lie outside the ken of human understanding. And then the idea that something we cannot see or touch or even be sure actually exists is instrumental in determining both the shape and the fate of the universe is just fantastically beautiful. I like to think that, like the fabric of the universe, the fabric of our own lives is also shaped by something like dark energy. I’m not talking about Freudian subconscious type stuff here, although dark energy would probably work as a metaphor for this, too. I’m talking about things that never happened but that nevertheless help determine who we are and what we will become. Things like missed opportunities and unrealized possibilities. Forgotten dreams, absent fathers, undeclared loves, unborn children, roads not taken, things we wish we’d said but didn’t. Things that aren’t and that never were, but that still exert gravitational force and affect the space around and within us. Resentments and regrets and secret sorrows and suppressed fantasies. Things that motivate us to make decisions and act in ways that don’t make sense to other people because the impetuses for our decisions and behaviors can’t be seen by others.

To my mind, dark energy blurs the distinction between what is real and what is not. I like to believe that within and around and beneath what we think of as “empirical reality” are things that can’t be observed by even the highest-tech gadgetry. Things that remain apart from our understanding but are nevertheless part of our existence. A shadow world overlying our own world. This may be because I read too much fiction and have all sorts of escapist tendencies, but whatever. I really believe that sometimes we can only make sense of things by acknowledging the existence – or at least the possibility – of things that do not make sense.

On Motherhood and Anxiety

Like most expectant mothers, while I was pregnant with my son I received all sorts of frightening though well-meant warnings from people who already had children and who felt compelled to puncture the fantasyland of pre-maternal delusions in which I was dwelling. Most of these were standard kiss-your-life-for-the-next-two-decades-goodbye type admonitions. Never again would I sleep eight consecutive hours, leave the house for anything other than grocery shopping or mommy-and-me swim classes, eat regular meals, or have a moment to myself for frivolous things like personal hygiene. Another, less conventional warning I received came from a friend who told me, “Once you have a child, you will understand fear on a whole new level.” This, as it turns out, was the truest statement of them all.

For the record, this fear thing isn’t new to me. I am an anxious person who even before having a baby lived pretty much perpetually in or on the verge of a state of panic. But after having a child, my fears and anxieties multiplied exponentially. The utter vulnerability and absolute helplessness of my newborn son cast into relief my own vulnerability and relative helplessness. I became acutely conscious of the extent to which I was subject to a whole host of conditions over which I had little or no control. It was as though I could feel the solar winds scraping across my skin. It was both terrifying and deeply humbling.

So anyway, I worry A LOT about MANY things. To illustrate, here is a far-from-exhaustive list of things that scare me:

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Natural disasters including but not limited to: hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, earthquakes, microbursts, and cloud-to-ground lightning

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Man-made disasters including but not limited to: nuclear holocaust, climate change and the effects thereof, biological weapons, and human stampedes

·          

Car accidents

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House fires

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Eastern Equine Encephalitis

  

The low levels of radiation emanating from my microwave oven

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 That one day my son might want to play football

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That one day my son might want to join the military

 ·          

That one day my son might want to drive a car

Because my son had swimming lessons earlier today, I’m currently worried about something called Cryptosporidiosis, which is a diarrheal disease caused by microscopic parasites that live in things like raw meat and public swimming pools. Oliver likes to drink the pool water, and it’s conceivable that he might also have consumed some of these nasty critters. That the risk of this is extremely low does not matter. The chance exists, and so I worry. Of course, I wouldn’t be worried about this if his swimming instructor hadn’t devoted five minutes of the first lesson to warning parents about the various dangers and symptoms associated with this particular infection. But she did, and now I’m freaked out.

Forewarned is forearmed, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe parents today aren’t a little too aware of all the dangers threatening their children. Take SIDS, for example. At this time last year, I was obsessed with the fear that my son would die in his sleep. Most new mothers I’ve spoken to about this subject admit to being or having once been similarly terrified. I don’t want to sound callous; SIDS is a terrible thing and awareness is important, but again, I think there’s such a thing as too much awareness. Months before my son was even born, my obstetrician handed me a pamphlet about SIDS. I was given the same pamphlet again before leaving the hospital. And again and again and again at his first three doctor’s appointments. Every baby book I read had at least a few pages devoted to SIDS. As you can imagine, all of this was really scary. And to make matters worse, no one could tell me a surefire way to prevent it from happening. Putting the baby down on his back could reduce the risk, but not eliminate it. Despite the fact that a healthy infant’s chances of dying from SIDS is around 0.05%, I was a basket case. If my son slept more than three consecutive hours, I was sure he had asphyxiated in his sleep and would rush in to check him. On more than one occasion, I actually jostled him until he woke up because I was convinced that he wasn’t breathing. This is not healthy behavior, but I know I’m not the only mother who’s done it.

 

And this SIDS thing is just one example. There are, it seems, an infinite array of diseases, disorders, and syndromes waiting to strike down apparently healthy children. It’s truly frightening and certainly worthy of concern, but isn’t it possible that too much concern can be detrimental?

 

I guess I’m worried that all this worrying might turn me into one of them. The parents who send irate emails to their kids’ second grade teachers demanding to know why their sons/daughters got a B in reading when their children are demonstrably excellent readers or who scream at little league coaches for sticking their kids in the outfield when they should be playing second base. These people are annoying to pretty much everyone, and I don’t want to be one of them. But maybe I’m starting to understand where they’re coming from. Like you spend countless hours worrying that your newborn will stop breathing and then worrying that maybe he isn’t yet waving hello to people because he’s autistic and then worrying that maybe that isn’t a mosquito bite on his arm but some sort of cancer and that even if it is just a mosquito bite, maybe the mosquito was carrying EEE or malaria or something, and then pretty soon worrying becomes a way of life and you become consumed by the need to control everything within your child’s environment, including other people. Don’t these teachers know what they’re doing to my child’s sense of self-esteem? Is that little league coach so blind that he can’t see how incredibly and exceptionally talented my son is? How many years of therapy will I have to pay for to undo all the damage these idiots are doing to my child?

 

Except, really, as most rational people recognize, in their fervor to protect their children, these parents are actually harming them. So I’m trying to chill out, but it isn’t easy. For instance, when my son’s swimming teacher wanted to use him to demonstrate underwater submersion, I bravely handed him over and watched as she casually tossed him into the pool and continued talking while my baby hovered under the water flailing his arms and legs like a damaged sea turtle. The other parents in the class tightened their hold on their own children, and my own maternal instincts impelled me to push that bitch of a swimming teacher out of the way and SAVE MY BABY! But I didn’t. I forced myself to watch calmly. Eventually, after what felt like ten minutes but was probably closer to ten seconds, the swimming teacher (who is really a very nice lady) retrieved my son. He emerged coughing and spluttering, but unharmed. I’d like to believe the experience made him stronger, but I can’t say for sure. I do know, however, that it made me a little stronger.

I Love Cold Medicine

I feel like a bucket o’ dung today. Or more accurately, a bucket of snot. For some reason, I find the latter image more reviling than the former. I’ll spare you an exposition on why this is so.  Anyhow, I’m tres congested and exceedingly whiny about it, but there is one aspect of having a cold that makes me happy: I have an excuse to take cold medicine.

I love cold medicine.

This morning I woke up and rifled through my medicine cabinet, carefully reading the labels on each of the panoply of over-the-counter cold medications stored therein. I opted to take the Tylenol Cold Multi-Symptom Severe Daytime Non-Drowsy formula because it was the only medication whose packaging included the warning, “Stop use and ask a doctor if nervousness, dizziness or sleeplessness occur.” Because that’s the kind of high I want to be today.  I find nasal congestion far easier to bear when I can’t actually feel my face.

So right now, I can’t actually feel my face. Plus, I’m feeling SUPER MOTIVATED. Like at any moment, I might leap up off the couch and go clean behind the fridge or exterminate the dust bunnies lurking under just about every piece of furniture in my house. 

In all likelihood, though, I’ll continue to sit on the sofa doing nothing but feeling, thanks to the euphoric effects of the cold medication, that this nothing I’m doing is really quite spectacularly something. This is probably for the best. 

The last time I dosed myself on cold medicine was approximately six weeks ago. I have a one year old, so already I’ve been sick more times this year than in the past two years put together. Anyway, maybe because I’m super dedicated but more likely because I’d managed to fall a week behind schedule, I was determined to teach my classes at any cost. So I took a long swig directly from a bottle of cold medicine, tucked the bottle into my messenger bag, and headed off to school. About five minutes into my first class, the following exchange took place:

Me: “Sit down, please.”

[The students stare at me from their seats.  The seats in which they are already sitting.  I sit down.]

Student in the back row: “Did you just tell yourself to sit down?”

Me: “What?

Student: “You just said sit down, and then you sat down.”

Me: “Oh. Yeah. I told you I’m sick. I took cold medicine. Lay off.”

Student: “Can’t you, like, get in trouble for coming to class high?”

Me: “I’m not high. I’m high on cold medicine.”

Student: “You just said you’re not high, you’re high.”

Me: “Shut up.”

Student: “Did you just tell me to shut up?”

Me: “No. I thought it.”

Student: “No, you said it. I heard you.”

Me: “Shut up.”

Clearly, I am nothing if not a professional. At any rate, a pretty astounding lesson on the passive voice was taught that day, so credit should be given to me for great valor in the face of a head cold.

Today, though, I don’t have to leave my house for any reason and will therefore have significantly fewer opportunities to publicly humiliate myself. Unless, of course, I decide to write a blog post. Incidentally, that last sentence caused me considerable grammatical anguish. Does one write a blog post? Or post to one’s blog? Or is “blog” an accepted verb at this point? I could look it up, but meh. I’m enjoying the illusion of productivity and don’t want to shatter it with anything resembling actual productivity.

On that note, I think I’ll shut up now. Extra-medicated love to you all.

Confessions of a Second-Grade Racist

In the second grade, I invited every kid in my class except one to my birthday party.  That only six kids actually came (two of whom weren’t even in my class) is another story.  It could have something to do with the fact that even then, I was a nerd of the first order.  It could also have to do with the fact that I was a racist.

Here’s the thing: the kid I didn’t invite was black.  The only black kid in the class.

It seems strange to me now that I didn’t realize then that what I was doing was pretty terrible.  Really terrible, actually.  In my defense, the circumstance of her race didn’t figure into my decision to exclude her from my party.  At least not consciously.  The real reason was that she had once pushed past me in line for the slide during recess.  There were other reasons, too, but this one was the most concrete.  The other reasons had to do with a vague sense that this particular person didn’t like me.  I will return to this later.

Anyway, in case you’re inclined to blame my parents: don’t.  They had no idea what I was up to.  I was an independent and strong-willed seven-year-old.  I filled out and addressed the invitations myself.  Had my mom or dad known, they certainly would have stopped me and explained a few things.  In fact, I’m pretty sure this will be the first time my mother has heard of this.  I expect she’ll call shortly to ask if it is true.  Yes mom, it’s true.  Your daughter was a second grade racist.

So I show up at school and start passing out invitations, and when I’m nearly done, the little girl in question (I can’t remember her name) stops me and says, “Where’s mine?”  I shuffle through the pile, shrug, murmur something incomprehensible.  I’m avoiding her eyes, but I know she’s looking directly at me.  When it becomes clear that I have no invitation to give her, she turns and stomps away.

It took me about twenty years to realize that I’d done a really bad thing.  I probably would have realized it sooner, but I’d managed, conveniently, to forget the entire episode until something happened to bring it back.  And now I feel awful about it. 

What I did was wrong on many fronts.  First of all, I should never have excluded anyone like that, regardless of that person’s race.  Especially since I was a nerdy kid who was myself regularly excluded from things and knew first-hand how terrible it feels to be left out.  I should have had more compassion than that. 

And then maybe the little girl’s race had nothing to do with it, but there’s no way she could have known that.  It must have hurt her in ways I can’t even begin to imagine to feel that she was singled out because of something she had no control over.  No one should experience that, especially not a child.  Now that I’m thirty-one and have a child of my own, I know how I will feel if anything like this ever happens to my son.  Anguished.  Outraged.  Appalled. 

Finally, I can’t convince myself that the same thing would have happened if the little girl had been white.  For one thing, I’m sure she wasn’t the only kid to bully me on the playground in the second grade.  Like I said, I was extremely nerdy.  I wore plastic framed glasses with thick, tinted lenses.  I routinely came to school with my sweat pants tucked into the tops of my galoshes, which I wore even when it wasn’t raining.  I used words like “eccentric” and “pulverize.”  As you can probably imagine, this didn’t impress my peers so much as confirm for them that I was weird.  So I can pretty much guarantee that I was picked on by a number of my classmates.  Yet when I addressed invitations to my birthday party, the only person whom I remembered picking on me was the black girl.  It may be that she was crueler to me than the others, but I doubt it.  I suspect that she stood out in my memory simply because she stood out in general.  In other words, because she was black.

As for my vague sense that she didn’t like me: It should be pretty clear to you that probably a lot of kids in my second grade class didn’t like me.  Like I said, I was weird.  So why did this particular girl’s enmity bother me more than anyone else’s?  Perhaps it had to do with the aforementioned obvious difference that this girl’s skin happened to be darker than everyone else’s.  In case you’re wondering, I grew up in a very small, very white community.  Most of my exposure to other races and cultures came through Sesame Street.  It’s entirely possible that this girl was the first honest-to-goodness dark-skinned person with whom I had ever directly interacted.  So maybe I found her more threatening than the others because she looked different.  It’s also possible that our misunderstanding was cultural.  I’m a little wary of this particular hypothesis, though, since I don’t actually know anything about her background.  But it is a possibility.

So anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I didn’t mean to be a racist, but I was.  This isn’t a fun thing to admit, and it’s tempting to try to lessen my own culpability by drawing all sorts of grand conclusions about human nature – i.e., that human beings are programmed to categorize and exclude other humans, or that a bullied child will look for opportunities to bully others.  I don’t want to do this, in part because these sorts of theories tend to perpetuate the very things they explain, but also because doing so wouldn’t change the fact that in the second grade, I committed an injustice that hurt another person.  And I am sincerely very sorry.

Eww! Whales!

I am afraid of many things.  None of my fears are debilitating, but some of them are really weird.  Probably my weirdest fear is of whales.  I’m terrified of whales.

This fear first surfaced (pun totally intended) at a lake in Ontario, Canada when I was three years old.  While other children played in the water, I stood on the shore in my Strawberry Shortcake one-piece.

“Mom?” I called.  “Are there any whales in that lake?”

“No, honey.  Whales live in the ocean.  Not in lakes.”

“But are you sure there aren’t any whales in that lake?”

Of course, I don’t actually remember any of this, but my mom has told the story so many times over the years that it’s entered my consciousness as a constructed memory of sorts.  I’m sure it’s true, though, because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d say.  Even now.

A few years later, when I began taking swimming lessons at the local YMCA, I was tormented by the fear that a whale would somehow squeeze through the drain at the bottom of the pool.  I know this doesn’t make any sort of rational sense, but keep in mind that I was like five years old and watched a lot of cartoons.  By cartoon logic, it makes complete sense.  A whale could easily be transmuted into vapor, drift through the drain pipe, and then reassemble itself inside the deep end of the pool. 

Yes, I know that whales are gentle and intelligent.  But they are also really big.  And they eat people.  The Bible says so (Jonah).  So does Walt Disney (Pinocchio).  If the Bible and Walt Disney agree on this, then certainly it must be true.  Right?

Grown ups

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend in which he said that despite being thirty years old and having a job and generally being what might be called in our culture an “adult,” he doesn’t feel like a grown up at all.  Me, either, I said.  That’s funny, he responded, because I always thought that having a kid kinda automatically made one an adult. 

At the time, I said this wasn’t really true.  I even felt a little defensive.  Adult?  Me?  Horsefeathers! 

Except when I really think about it, I realize that I am possibly kind of maybe a little adult-ish and I just don’t want to admit it.

Why don’t I want to admit it?

Let’s do a little free association to get to the bottom of this, shall we?  Alright, Peggy, when I say “adult,” what words spring to mind?

Stability.

Responsibility.

Monotony.

The Dress Barn.

Can you see the common thread here? That’s right: none of these things are cool.  And when I consolidate these words into an image of what adult life looks like, it gets even worse.  Here’s how I picture the typical routine of the average American adult: Wake up way too early, brew the coffee I will drink while watching The Today Show on NBC, head off to work wearing a snappy turtle neck and trousers with a pleated tummy panel, endure a minimum of eight hours of mindless drudgery behind a desk stacked with pictures from last year’s family vacation at Sandals Resort Bahamas, go home, make dinner, watch TV, go to bed.  Wake up and repeat, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

So do you see why I might be a little reluctant to become an adult?

And I know I’m not the only person who feels this way.  For many people in and around my age (arguably, for every generation since at least the 1960s), adulthood represents a trap of sorts.  Adulthood means being ensnared within “the system,” becoming a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall.  It represents the end of individuality, of possibility, of hope. 

Of course, the alternative to adulthood is a sort of perpetual adolescence wherein we remain uncommitted to anybody or anything, wafting from one thing to the next without attachment or restraint.  Untouched and untouching.  Apart from the whole rather than a part of the whole.  It’s alluring, but unsustainable.  Eventually, we all have to choose something because at some point even not choosing becomes a choice. 

So I guess my son was my choice.  He is my commitment, my attachment.  For him, I will be a cog in the machine and a brick in the wall.  And you know what?  It’s really not that bad.

Why I Believe in Fairies

Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I do many silly things.  Some of these things – such as habitually misplacing my keys and routinely starting kitchen fires – I do inadvertently.  There are, though, a number of other silly things I do intentionally. Such as knocking on wood every time I say something I feel has “tempted fate,” or saying, “Someone has walked across my grave” whenever I feel an unexplained shiver.  The truth is that despite being reasonably educated, I remain a deeply superstitious person.  I realize that this probably comes across as coldly elitist; by saying that I am superstitious in spite of my education, I am implying that a majority of people who practice superstitious behaviors do so because they are uneducated and don’t know any better.  This may or may not be true.  I don’t know.  I do know, however, that the word “superstition” is laden with all sorts of negative connotations.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines superstition as “[u]nreasoning awe or fear of something unknown, mysterious, or imaginary, esp. in connection with religion; religious belief or practice founded upon fear or ignorance.”  So there you have it.  By admitting to being superstitious, I’ve acknowledged that I am driven by ignorance and fear to cling to imaginary and irrational explanations for those things that lie outside of my understanding.

 

But at least I’ve admitted it, right?   

 

Therein lies the problem.  By acknowledging that my superstitious beliefs are rooted in ignorance and unreason I am (a) embracing the sort of enlightenment thinking that seeks dismantle the very things in which I profess to believe, and (b) confessing that I don’t really believe in the things I believe.  In this manner, my knocking on wood so that the good thing I have just acknowledged will continue to occur is akin to attending church because I don’t want to go to hell just in case there happens to be a God.  In short, it’s an empty gesture.  Or an ironic gesture.  Take your pick.

 

The thing is, though, that I really want to believe.  Honestly.  Not just because I’m afraid.  And I am afraid.  I feel no shame in admitting this.  Seriously, what person can contemplate the “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” without feeling even the slightest twinge of fear?  Who hasn’t lain awake in the darkness grappling with the certainty that one day her body will shut down and that at that moment, her consciousness might disappear entirely?  I’ll tell you who: the true believer.  The one who sees reason in unreason, who can reconcile fact with belief.  And yes, I wish I were one of these people.  I wish I could find comfort in certainty, even if I do end up being wrong in the end.  But I can’t, and really, this isn’t why I try to believe in the things in which I can’t really believe. 

 

I want to believe because belief can be beautiful.  I want to believe because there are things that can’t be explained, things that defy reason.  At least I hope so.  Because while science and reason have the power to explain some things brilliantly, they strip the magic and wonder from other things.  Scientific explanations of the interactions among celestial bodies can be gorgeous.  Absolutely soul-stirring.  Attempts to explain interactions among human beings?  Not so much.  Love?  A biological mechanism aimed toward ensuring the continuation of the species through procreation.  Death?  A natural stage in the life cycle wherein the body returns to the earth as organic material.  In short, we become nothing more than the sum of our body’s physical components and functions.  Perhaps this is true, but I find it reductive and unspeakably depressing.  Frankly, if I am living merely to survive and reproduce, I don’t know if I want to live.  I guess I’m just romantic like that.

 

So anyway, I do kooky little superstitious things because, even though I’m not capable of any sort of capital “B” religious-type Beliefs, I believe – or want to believe – that there are elements of existence that can’t be observed or measured or explained.  Little sparks of magic glimmering in the air all around us.  The fairies stole my keys again.  A ghost left that paper towel on the stove.  Of course I know these things aren’t empirically true.  They are metaphors for the aspects of myself that I do not want to rationalize or domesticate.  And when I knock on wood, I’m really just saying, “thank you, whatever you are.”

This Is "Shorely" Wrong

I first heard of Jersey Shore in the spring of 2009.  I was a teaching assistant at the University of New Hampshire, and one of the students in my First-Year Writing class described his afternoon routine using the acronym GTL.  What is GTL?  I asked him in a conference.  He looked at me appraisingly, as though he were trying to decide if my question was serious or if I was just pretending to be an ignorant loser. 

“It’s from Jersey Shore?” he said.  Aha!  I thought.  This is some sort of cultural thing.

“I didn’t know you were from New Jersey!”  Again, the appraising look. 

“It’s a television show.” He paused, clearly trying to decide whether he should explain to me what a television is.  You know, it’s like a box with a screen and you plug it into the wall and then you can see pictures on the screen and hear voices and noises and stuff and it tells you stories. It’s really fun, Ms. Morgan.  Way better than those books stacked all over your desk.  You should seriously try it.  “GTL is Gym Tanning Laundry.  Because you know, you gotta look good.”

Of course.  GTL.  Gym Tanning Laundry.  Silly English teacher.

So this conversation was mildly disturbing, but really not atypical of the conversations one has when speaking to nineteen-year-old business majors about their freshman writing assignments.  I figured this Jersey Shore thing was some sort of anomaly.  I mean, I’ve learned many new and bizarre things from students over the years.  For instance, that “frat mattress” does not actually refer to bedding and that “Birdman” is not a character on Sesame Street but a rapper.  Fascinating little nuggets of information that languish in my memory because (mercifully) I don’t often encounter situations in which they need to be retrieved. 

The Jersey Shore thing, however, proved to be different.  It didn’t go away, but kept reappearing with greater frequency and intensity.  A creature named “Snooki” surfaced everywhere.  Even President Obama mentioned it at least once.  And I began to feel like the college courses I taught consisted of one long Jersey Shore reference that I was, for the most part, completely missing.  Last fall, I taught a writing course that went late on Thursday evening, and one student routinely pleaded for class to end early because “it’s t-shirt time!”

But aren’t you already wearing a t-shirt? I thought.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I finally sat down to watch an episode of Jersey Shore.  It was . . .alarming.  Like seriously.  It was fucked up.

Before I go any farther with this, I should tell you that even though I’m a terrible snoot, I really do like reality TV.  I love Teen Mom and the Real Housewives of every city except maybe Atlanta (but I will totally watch that season if there’s nothing else on).  Admittedly, my reality TV fascination (let’s not call it an addiction) stems from and reflects some of the truly ugly sides of human nature.  For instance, the need to distinguish oneself as different and superior by judging other people as stupid or ugly or just plain mean.  It’s also a nifty form of escapism.  These people are living lives I will never live, could never even imagine if I didn’t see them streaming through my TV set.  Arguably, they are living lives that don’t actually exist.  (Just yesterday, I complained to a friend that the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills make me feel like a lard ass.  She responded, “Oh honey, those women aren’t real.”)  At any rate, I’m not some elitist asshole who thinks all television is evil and that everyone who watches it is a mindless drone blithely marching toward the destruction of human civilization. 

Jersey Shore, though?  That’s different.  Personally, I found it to be pretty boring.  I mean, watching other people get really drunk and argue over who has to clean the kitchen isn’t terribly fun.  It’s pretty mundane stuff, really.  For example, the episode to which I subjected myself contained a scene in which three girls sat on a sofa playing with their hair and exchanging sullen glances because one had reportedly called another one “fake.”  For like three minutes.  Cue the crickets.  I’m going to bed.

So the show itself is maybe not all that insidious.  The thing that totally freaked the shit out of me was that as I was watching, I realized that for many people under, say, twenty-five, the world of Jersey Shore has become a sort of ideal.  The hair thing, for instance.  I have on more than one occasion stopped class to ask a young lady if she had bubblegum stuck in her hair or something because she was so absorbed in pulling apart the individual strands and examining them that I thought, surely there must be a problem here.  But no.  This is apparently what the females on JS do any time they find themselves in an awkward/boring/distressing situation.  And then there is the fact that I was pretty much right about the JS reference thing.  An alarming percentage of undergraduate discourse seems to consist of Jersey Shore references.  T-Shirt time.  Fist pumping.  The smush room.  And then, of course, the objectification of all people, male and female.  Forget use-value.  We’re talking sex-value.  Good looking men are gorillas (eerrrp?), whereas unattractive women are hippopotamuses.  It’s base.  It’s lewd.  It devalues human beings and makes young people feel that the size of their breasts/pectoral muscles is more important than the size of their intellect.  And I, for one, do not believe this to be true.  Twenty years from now, when Snooki’s ample bosom has descended to touch her navel, will anyone care to watch her drunken exploits?  I think not. 

Rhetoric and Social Responsibility

I should preface this post by stating that I don't really know a whole lot about politics.  I'm not a political activist and I don't consider myself to be exceptionally well informed about political issues. In fact, I spend significantly more time reading fiction than I do reading the newspaper; however, I am deeply troubled by the shootings that occurred yesterday at a political rally in Arizona.  For me, this event reveals a disturbing fissure in American political culture.

I am a liberal.  I believe firmly in free speech.  I also believe in social responsibility, especially among elected officials.  In the hours since an obviously disturbed 22 year old man opened fire on a crowd of people in Arizona and killed at least six of them (two of whom were elderly women and one of whom was a 9 year old girl), many commentators have pointed to the violent and incendiary rhetoric of the Tea Party movement as a possible inspiration for this young man's actions.  I do not feel comfortable accusing Sarah Palin or any of her cohorts of "causing" yesterday's violence in Arizona, but I do feel that the rhetoric employed by the Tea Party movement is disgusting and irresponsible.

As I see it, the role of government should be to protect the most vulnerable members of society.  In a country as wealthy and "developed" as ours, it is sickening that children go hungry and chronically ill people go without medial care.  Yes, I realize I'm talking about socialism.  More importantly, though, I'm talking about basic human compassion.  This sort of compassion seems to be entirely absent from the Tea Party movement, a movement that (as far as I can discern) seeks to perpetuate the alienation of the poor and uneducated in our nation while at the same time exploiting the anger and injustice they feel over said alienation.  Essentially, rather than helping people in need, Tea Partiers draw upon the rage of the disenfranchised to achieve political ends that stand in direct contrast to the interests of the people they purport to represent.  This is disgusting enough by itself, but when elected officials resort to threatening to put other politicians "in the firing line" or posting a "hit list" in which the faces of their political enemies are framed by the sights of a gun, things have, in my opinion, gone too far.  Granted, I sincerely doubt Palin or anyone else intended for these things to be interpreted literally, but even a mother bear of very little brains should be able to figure out that someone somewhere is going to be just angry and deranged enough to do so.  So rhetorical violence becomes actual violence, and a little girl loses her life.