Laws of Attraction

Coincidences are funny things. A few weeks ago, when I told a 50-something friend of mine that she was “eye candy”, she laughed and said that I definitely needed to get new glasses. A few hours later, a 20-something friend of mine posted on Facebook how it felt like a punch in the stomach when some of her “more conventionally attractive” friends posted about how unattractive they felt, and acted surprised when all the reassurances came in.

Wow.

I responded that I’m always surprised at the people who I think are attractive, but don’t think they are themselves; and suggested that maybe they’re not being disingenuous about it.

Let’s talk about my first friend. It’s true that she’s no hot 26-year-old, and maybe she feels that she was more attractive 30 years and 30 pounds ago; but I didn’t know her then. All I’ve known is the 50-something pudgy version of her, and this 60-something could look at that 50-something all day long.

Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate an attractive 26-year-old just as well as I could when I was 26 myself. However, now that I’m in my 60s, I can appreciate a slightly pudgy 50 or 60-something in ways that I couldn’t have imagined when I was 26.

And then there’s me. When I look in the mirror, I see my grandfather, who was 63 when I was born, and he lived to be 86. I look in the mirror and I see an old man who’s not as skinny as he used to be. So it came as quite the surprise one day when a very attractive woman in her early 40s came up to me at the library and said that I was more attractive in person than I was on my posters.

Really? Me? Now? As with my first friend, I can see it 30 years and 30 pounds ago. When I was in my 30s, I might have feigned surprise to hear someone say that, because I knew I was halfway decent looking. But this old guy? Are you kidding me? Now that’s a real surprise.

And I wasn’t being disingenuous about it. I just didn’t see it.

Or rather, I was focused on what I thought I had to look like in order to be attractive to people, and not what other people were actually thinking. And what many of us think we have to look like to be attractive to others is young. Young and thin. Or buff…or shapely.

Even though I obviously didn't think that way about others. Which brings me to an important point: we often judge ourselves by harsher standards than we judge others, or than others judge us.

The laws of attraction are very funny things; and they change as we get older. I’d like to think that they change to represent more of what people in our age group look like. But even when we’re young, our standards of beauty are different from person to person.

I’ve seen people who I understood by current standards were strikingly beautiful, and gone “Meh.” I mean, I can see it, I can understand it, but they just don’t do anything for me. On the other hand, there are people that I might once have rated a 4/10, who by the simple force of their personalities, became attractive to me, and have me checking them out every time I see them. As I said to my wife about one friend of ours, “I don’t check out Sally because she’s necessarily hot. I check out Sally because she’s Sally.”

But what are the laws of attraction? This geek would love to know. He would love to know what makes Person A attractive to Person B, but not to Person C.

And what makes my second friend attractive to unknown people who just haven’t spoken up yet.

Anna Jarvis Still Isn't Happy

I first posted this four years ago, but as Mother’s Day approaches again, I think it's time for it to get another airing. So here you go. Enjoy!

                                                                                     

Wait! Put down that box of candy. Forget about ordering those flowers. And whatever you do, don’t put that card in the mail! Anna Jarvis would not be happy.

What on earth am I talking about, and who the heck is Anna Jarvis?

For those of you who didn’t know Anna Jarvis is the woman who created our modern celebration of Mother’s Day. She also ended up hating what her creation had turned into, and spent the rest of her life trying to kill the “monster” she had created.

But let me back up a little bit.

She had intended Mother’s Day to be both a memorial to her own mother, who had died in 1905, and a day like many of the other observances that came out of the Sunday School movement of the time; things like Roll Call Day, Temperance Sunday, and Missionary Sunday, which have long been forgotten. As such, it was her intent that since it was on a Sunday, it would be a “holy day, not a holiday,” and a day on which people would write heartfelt letters to their mothers, telling how important they were to them.

However, within 10 years of Woodrow Wilson’s 1914 proclamation of the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, Jarvis was soured by what she considered to be the commercialization of her “holy day,” and actively campaigned against it. She had meant for it to be “a day of sentiment, not profit,” and was angered by the huge profits that the candy, flower, and greeting card industries were making off of her mother’s day.

She was incensed that it had become that most loathsome of all things…the dreaded “Hallmark Holiday,” a term which is horribly misused, because Hallmark didn’t create those holidays, they simply made a mint recognizing that many people would like cards to send out on them.

And that’s what pissed her off…the fact that people sent their mothers printed greeting cards rather than a heartfelt, handwritten letter. Or to quote her:

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.

Now, I’m quite certain that if I wrote my mother the kind of letter that Anna Jarvis wanted me to, she’d be on the phone immediately, asking how many days I had left to live. I also know that if I wrote the kind of letter that Jarvis wanted us all to write, I’d have to double my insulin dosage for the day. My family is just not that overtly sentimental.

And that’s OK. For you see, the other thing that Anna Jarvis didn’t get is that for many families the candy, the flowers, and the dreaded greeting card, are symbols of what she wanted people to say outright. They are symbols of what is already understood within the families that use them, and that might even mean more than the handwritten note she insisted upon.

I can only imagine Anna Jarvis’s reaction to the grandmother of a friend of mine who would’ve seen the handwritten note as a sign that you were too lazy to go to the store and pick out a nice Hallmark card for her. She'd say "Write the note if you want…but make sure it’s in a proper card!"

Ironically, one of the reasons that Anna Jarvis didn’t get it was because she was never a mother herself. To her, Mother’s Day was always about her own mother, and was never something she got to experience from the other side, where she might have gained a different perspective.

She didn’t understand that once she’d let the genie out of the bottle, people would observe Mother’s Day any way they wanted to, whether it was the way she had in mind or not. And so she spent the rest of her life trying to stuff that all too independent genie back. She was so set on having Mother’s Day observed the way that she had intended, that she never paid attention to the joy millions of women got from the way that it actually was being observed.

And so if your mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, wife, whatever, enjoys the candy, the cards, and the flowers, I say run out and get them right now. Thank Anna for the idea, but then tell her that she's being a bit too much of a control freak.

For more information, you might want to check out these links:

For the Mother of Mother’s Day, It’s Never Been Just Right

Mother’s Day Creator Likely Spinning in Her Grave

Enough Pain to Go Around

Many years ago I dated a girl who made a big deal about selfishness. Well…let me rephrase that…she made a big deal about my selfishness. And my selfishness was defined as any time that I didn’t want to do what she wanted to do, or didn’t want to do things the way that she wanted to do it. Any time I tried to get my way once in a while, I could count on being accused of being selfish.

Funny thing is that I knew that if anything, she was the one being selfish by demanding her way all the time. But I also knew that pointing out her selfishness would just be proof to her of mine.

I was aware that I often wanted my own way. I was aware that we all often want our own way…her included. I was also aware that as a result of that, there needed to be a little give and take…some compromises…to reach a point where one side wasn’t getting all while the other was getting none. I knew that there was enough desire for our own way on both sides of this relationship to go around…and that it wasn’t right that she was the one getting all while I was the one getting none.

But “compromise” isn’t in your vocabulary when you feel that you have the moral high ground…which may only be a mound that you’ve made out dirt dug out from the other person’s yard.

There’s something to be said for being an outsider, a third party with no vested interest in the situation, and who can look at it clearly and dispassionately. A third person could clearly have called her on her own selfishness, and she’d have to accept it without lashing out at them. Similarly, had I seen the same situation playing out in someone else’s relationship, I would’ve given the advice that I couldn’t give myself.

However, I’m not here to talk about that relationship today. I want to talk about pain. Not the physical kind…the emotional kind.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine posted an article titled Six Signs That You Might Not Really Respect Your Transgender Loved One. As I read the article, I was reminded of a transgender person I heard speak a few months earlier about dealing with her family, and how evil they were because they didn’t recognize or acknowledge the pain she was going through.

In both cases I was able to see things much differently because I was the disinterested third party. The two transgender people here were only able to see things from their perspective. They were only able to recognize and acknowledge their own pain and suffering. They couldn’t…or wouldn’t…see what their families were going through.

And I call “bullshit” on that.

When their family members explain that this is hard on them too, when they try to cling to a few reminders of what they thought we happy family moments from the past, and the transgender person responds by saying that this is just another sign of how little they really care about them, this is just like my old girlfriend claiming that any time I tried to point out when she was being selfish was just further proof of how selfish I was.

These people are saying “My pain is the only real pain, the only valid pain, the only pain that matters. they may have pain too, but it’s not mine, so it doesn’t matter, and can be belittled and discounted. when your pain conflicts with my pain, you just need to suck it up and let me have my way because my pain’s more important.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one gets to have all their way all the time. No one gets a pain-free life. We all have to deal with a little pain for the sake of someone else…especially when both sides are hurting. We all have to give a little.

That includes both transgender people and their families.

And my former girlfriend.

Thank You for the Music

Here are a few thoughts for all those people who say that depending on streaming from Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music is so much better than actually owning the music and having it take up valuable space on your hard drive and/or mobile device...

I'm old. I remember having a stereo system with lots of components. First it was the receiver and turntable. Then the cassette deck. Then the double cassette deck. Then the CD player. Then the five-CD player. That's a lot of equipment to have in your living room all wired together.

I also remember records...over 1000 45s and 300 albums also taking up space in my living room. I remember the cassette mixtapes I made from them. And then there were the CDs.

Oh yes, and I remember buying records...and the fact that for the 79¢ you paid for a 45, you got one song you wanted and one song you probably didn’t. That meant about 40¢ a song...in 1966 money. I’ll let you calculate the adjustment to 2017 dollars.

And as much as I tried (and I tried really hard), I could never come up with a good, easy to use, cataloging and filing system for all those records. And even when I did, there was no guarantee that I’d put the records right back where they belonged when I was done playing them.

Between the equipment and the media, I was begging for someone to invent something that would allow me to put all the music I owned into one small place so I could get my living room back.

And in 2001 it happened, with the introduction of the iPod. “1000 songs in your pocket” they said. That was pretty much the equivalent of the “A side” of all the singles I owned. But soon the capacity went up to more and more and more. My 64gb iPod Touch could theoretically hold 15,000 songs.

Better yet, though, came the ability to store even more music on the hard drive of my computer...provided I had a large enough hard drive. I didn’t have to keep all the music on my iPod, just my favorites. It took a while for me to replace all my vinyl with digital versions, and yes, in many cases it meant buying again; but I got my living room back, and my stereo now consisted of an iPod and a portable set of speakers.

But my point, my real point, is that all you people who complain about how much disk space it takes and how much it costs to buy music as opposed to renting it through streaming is this: It’s still less physical space, even if I buy an extra external hard drive for it, to own all that music digitally than to have all that vinyl sitting around the house...uncataloged and unorganized. And it’s still cheaper, at $1.29 per song that I want in 2017 money than it was for a double-sided single at 79¢ in 1966.

So from my aged perspective, that hard drive full of music that I’ve paid for is a vast improvement over that living room full of equipment, records, cassettes, and CDs.

And...I’ll always have the music because I own it. The day won’t come when some record label or artist decides that they don’t want me to be able to play it anymore...as they might with Spotify or Pandora.

Now don’t get me wrong…there are some great things about those streaming services. In an era when radio is increasingly specialized and you can no longer find a station that plays a little of everything, I use Pandora for discovery by creating a bunch of stations with different genres, and then shuffling them so that a song by Ingrid Michaelson could be followed by one by Ray Charles, Bert Kaempfert, the Beatles, Benny Goodman, Kathy Mattea or some artist I haven’t heard of yet.

And then…when I hear something new that I like…I’ll buy it.

Are Some of Us Part of the Problem?

I’m going to ask my fellow liberals a question which may seem downright unthinkable, but which needs to be asked. After all, if we expect “them” to do some serious self-examination, then we really ought to do some too. And here’s the question:

Have some of us been part of the problem?

In other words, have some of us pushed so hard, so fast, and so obnoxiously that we caused the cultural backlash that helped put Trump in office?

I know...heresy, isn’t it? How is it possible to push too hard, too fast, and too obnoxiously for things that we believe are right?

Well, first of all, imagine hearing those words coming from “them”, because they believe that they’re right too; and they’re pushing just as hard. But more to the point, I want to tell you about something that happened to a friend of mine.

He recently had a woman who “identified herself, rather loudly, as a feminist” go ballistic on him for holding the door for her. What he saw as simply being polite, and not letting the door slam in the face of the person...male or female...behind him, she took as him trying to assert his masculinity and dominance over her.

And I can sadly say that this is not an isolated incident. I’ve heard of this happening to countless guys before, and I have to ask myself is it this type of loud, obnoxious “feminist” that causes certain conservative pundits to use the term “feminazi”?

Have they pushed things just a little too far, and destroyed any goodwill that the women’s movement might have had among some people?

I told my friend that this woman was not a feminist, but a bully and a jerk. I also reminded him that about 5% of any group is likely to be made up of bullies and jerks, and he just happened to have run into one of them.

But let’s look at this from the larger perspective. Have some of us on the extreme liberal end of things pushed too far, too hard, too fast...and too obnoxiously, thus setting the stage for the Trump backlash?

It’s a definite possibility.

Recently, I read a great book, Why Liberals Win (Even when They Lose Elections). At the end of the book, after the author has made his point from episodes in American history, he brings up a question...the same question I’m bringing up here: Are we sometimes our own worst enemies by pushing too hard?

Sometimes we’re too strident about everyone being “accepting”, so strident that we can’t accept other people’s honest differences of conscience, and we end up trying to bully them into doing things our way…which is, of course, the right way.

Really…can’t we be flexible as some major cultural changes are happening…changes that are happening way too fast for some people to easily assimilate, but that will happen nonetheless, no matter how much pushback we see at the moment?

Do Adam and Steve really have to have that bakery make the cake for their wedding? Or more to the point, do they really have to have that bakery decorate the cake in a way that is in total opposition to their beliefs? Can we consider for a moment that this might be like going to the kosher bakery and not just asking them to make a cake that we’ll be using on Easter Sunday, but to decorate it with “He is Risen”?

And…with all the other qualified people in the County Clerk’s office who could do the job, is it really necessary for them to insist on that clerk signing their marriage license? Is that asserting their rights, or is it bullying?

This brings us back to my friend and the self-proclaimed “feminist.” Are we, in our “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” push for social change, behaving like that woman and others like her, and losing any goodwill that we might have gained by taking a more measured and thoughtful approach?

It’s definitely a question worth considering.

Chocolate, Milk, and Sex Maniacs

Three years ago, in response to a disastrous Facebook conversation where I tried to explain that men’s feelings about sex are more nuanced than many women seem to think, and in which one of the women involved said, “Not all women are sex maniacs” (thereby implying that all men are), I wrote the blog piece Sex and the Third Rail.

Funny thing is, though, that I never really got the chance to explain how nuanced guys’ feelings about sex are. I simply wrote about the experience that led up to the blow up.

I’m going to try to do that now, using the example of chocolate milk.

Really…chocolate milk.

But before I start, let’s remember that all analogies are faulty in one way or another, so I don’t want you to start picking this apart. Just look at it as a chance to go, “Oh…I never thought of it that way before.”

OK, now that we’ve got that settled, let me ask you this question: Is chocolate milk all chocolate, all milk, or some combination of both?

OK, assuming that you’re not either stupid or trolling me, you answered that it’s some combination of both. Well, using the standard formula for making a glass of chocolate milk at home, I’ve figured that it’s 84% milk and 16% chocolate. That still means that it’s mostly milk…in fact, it’s overwhelmingly milk…but that little bit of chocolate you add, which is spread out all through the milk now, has a huge effect on the color and flavor. And…unless you have a centrifuge, it’s pretty much impossible to separate the chocolate from the milk.

Now let’s do a little substitution here, and say that the milk represents emotions and the chocolate represents sexual desire. If we do that, then I think we can say that guys are pretty much represented by chocolate milk. By pre-packaged chocolate milk. Sex isn’t the only thing we think about, we are emotional creatures, we are very emotional creatures; but sexual desire, like the chocolate in the milk, is all wound up in the emotions, and can’t easily be separated out.

It’s not all we think of, but it’s in everything we think about. And even then, it’s only a small part of what’s in what we’re thinking about. But it’s inseparable from the rest.

And we not only love chocolate milk, but we have a warehouse of it to give.

Now let’s consider women. Women seem to be more like a gallon of plain milk sitting next to a bottle of Hershey’s syrup. They can pour themselves out plain, and then add some chocolate to themselves if they wish. But the chocolate’s not there all the time, it’s not an intrinsic part of their makeup…it’s just an option that’s available to them should they want it.

And women have a warehouse that stores a lot of plain milk and some Hershey’s syrup.

The problem is that when a woman asks for a glass of milk, and keeps being presented with chocolate milk by her guy, he looks like a “sex maniac.” Similarly, when the guy asks for a glass of milk, and gets plain 2%, he’s wondering why it’s so bland, why there can’t be a little chocolate to it, and why she gets so mad when he tries to go get the bottle of Hershey’s syrup.

But…he’s not 100% chocolate syrup. That’s the definition of a sex maniac here…a person who wants to drink an entire 8-ounce glass of that stuff all the time. And I don’t think anyone could do that.

Although…there does seem to be a stereotype about women loving chocolate.

Sh-Boom

It’s established pop music history that classic 50s songs like Sh-Boom, Tweedlee Dee, Hearts of Stone, and many others were recorded by black artists on minor labels before they were “covered” by white artists on major labels and became major hits. And it’s generally felt by many fans of the original versions that the original artists were “cheated” out of the glory due them by “inferior” cover versions by white artists. They feel that the cover versions “whitewashed” the soul right out of the originals by making them smoother and slicker, and more acceptable to “mainstream” audiences. To these people, the originals are the real thing, and the cover versions are (racial pun not intended) pale imitations that really had no right to exist.

As a music history person, I’m not sure that I ever felt that strongly, although once I discovered the original versions of songs I’d heard for years by the Penguins and others, I discovered that I generally liked the rougher versions better. As a music history person, I knew that everyone borrows from everyone else. In fact, I even wrote about it a few years ago.

However, I had a spectacular revelation at a barbershop harmony concert about a year ago. Here different barbershop groups, male and female, got together to present two or three favorite songs, done in barbershop style. These ranged from old barbershop classics to current hits. And as I listened to them sing these songs, it hit me…

The people who covered those 50s songs by black artists didn’t “steal” anything from anyone. They didn’t “whitewash” the soul out of anything. They simply did those same songs in a different style…a style that was popular with the mainstream audiences of the day. And they didn’t cheat those black artists out of their glory either, because the original versions weren’t going to be played on mainstream radio stations or bought by mainstream audiences anyway; they’d remain in the province of people who listened to what were then called “race” radio stations and bought “race” records.

The composers of those songs, however…well they cried all the way to the bank, having made money off of both versions.

Why is it that we feel that the original artist is the only one who has a right to have a hit with a particular song?

Let’s take a look at I Can’t Stop Loving You. Ray Charles wasn’t the first person to record it. That honor goes to country singer Don Gibson in 1957. His version made it all the way to number 7 on the Billboard Country chart but only to 81 on the (mainstream) Hot 100. But when Ray Charles recorded it in 1962, it went up to number 1 on the Hot 100, R&B, and Adult Contemporary charts. It was a reversal of the trend of white artists getting major hits off of songs first recorded by black artists.

I’m sure that Gibson, who also wrote the song, cried all the way to the bank, when the Ray Charles version introduced the song to an even wider audience and made it a standard. In fact, I bet that when he got that royalty check from the Ray Charles version, he thought to himself, “life could be a dream, sh-boom!”