Rooful.

Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

A conversation when I went home for my baby shower:

"So are you circumcising Tweedle?"

"I told J that since it's a boy it's up to him. If it were a girl I'd decide. And as for female circumcisions, well, I'm foursquare against."

"Heh. That's what we did, too."

"Did you hear they're trying to make circumcisions illegal in San Francisco?"

"Except if you're Jewish, right?"

"No, that's part of the hubbub-- no religious exemptions."

"That's ridiculous."

"I'm not sure I'd go so far as to make them illegal."

"No religious exceptions?"

"No. The thinking is that that'd be like allowing clitoridectomies to be performed for traditional Muslims or whatever."

"People say that all the time. But it's not like a clitoridectomy. Clitoridectomies are like removing the whole penis."

"Yeah. It's not the same. Men who've had circumcisions can still enjoy sex."

"We sure can!"

"I'll second that."

"Actually, I've been doing a lot of research on this... to help out J... anyway, I actually had a chance to talk to a few men who'd had circumcisions as adults, who were willing to talk about it. And they said that sex felt just as good after. Well, one guy said masturbating wasn't the same..."

"Why did they have it done?"

"Phimosis. Both of them had it."

"That's what [my nephew] had! Wait. I think that's it..."

"Phimosis is like if you were wearing a turtleneck and it was too tight to pull down over your head."

"Yes! That's it."

"I wasn't sure-- Mom said something about adhesions. And I wasn't sure... I read that you can cause those if you try to retract a foreskin on a baby..."

"We never did that!"

"...because that's like the worst thing you can do..."

"We know!"

"...but sometimes doctors tell patients to do that because they're ignorant."

[mildly offended silence.]

"You know, back when we had [my nephew], in Berkeley, they were already on the anti-circumcision crusade there, and he'd already been through so much, and I just didn't want to put him through anything painful. I'm so glad we waited until he was old enough to remember the surgery, and can point to the hospital and say that's were he got his penis chopped."

"Oh. Poor kid. He's fine, now, though, right?"

"Yeah!"

"You know, back when you were having him I was going to say something but I thought It's none of my business, I should keep my mouth shut. But I was going to recommend you have it done. It's healthier. Given how things turned out, I wish I had. But now I'm telling you, get your son circumcised."

...

I didn't.

I flew right in the face of my father's explicit advice and my family culture, not to mention my husband's initial feelings on the matter.

Why?

Perhaps more to the point, why bother writing about my why, when the Internet is well-nigh glutted with accounts scientific and personal and somewhere in-between, arguing that people who circumcise their children are ignorant butchers, or that people who don't circumcise are intolerant wingnuts who have no respect for religious or cultural precedent or the possibility of medical benefits associated with the procedure...

And there you have it-- I'm writing about my decision-making process because I think supplying some points between the two poles of a deeply divided discourse could be a worthwhile endeavor.

We'll see.

continued...

This isn't what I thought I'd be writing about. I guess my brain had other ideas.

J and I watched Charlie Rose yesterday. Have you ever noticed how very wristy Charlie Rose is? My mental picture of Charlie Rose is at least eighty percent wrist-- which is strange, since wrists aren't normally an assertive part of the anatomy. I think it must be that he likes to wave his arms around a lot when he's speaking, and his arms are rather long, so his sleeves pull up and give his wrists a lot of inadvertent camera time.

Charlie Rose-- eighty percent wrist, twenty percent never wanting to shut up and let his guests answer his questions.

Anyway, his show was a rerun of an interview he did back in March with David Brooks-- a New York Times columnist and author of a book called The Social Animal , which deals with the relationship between decision-making and the emotions. J and I had been charmed by Brooks' soft-spoken, self-deprecating humor and smarts, when we'd seen him lecturing on C-span a few weeks back, so we were curious what he'd have to say to Charlie.

[Now you know. We're the sort of people who occasionally enjoy watching Book TV.]

[At least we aren't so far gone we find the cartoons in The New Yorker funny.]

I haven't read Brooks' book yet, but the sense I have is that it's rather refreshingly positive about how emotions intelligently inform our decision-making-- that a Vulcan-like insistence on impassive reason is not only a rather deluded notion of how humans process information, but can also deprive us of an important resource when it comes to choosing well.

In other words, people take in far more information than we can ever efficiently process on a conscious level. But we develop feelings about that information. I imagine this sort of processing is akin to what we often describe as intuition-- gut-level responses to people or situations, that we sense, but might struggle to explain adequately in words. Hard-core rationalists might insist that heeding those feelings is a mistake-- that they obscure a clear-eyed view of the truth. But our emotions are more sophisticated than many of us realize, as tools, as moral guides.

I'm happy to see these ideas gaining currency in our culture. This is not to say I don't believe in questioning my assumptions. Far from it. I value a commitment to challenging prejudices, a willingness to examine and change even beloved, long-held beliefs, based on knowledge and evidence. I think striving to be impersonal can be a valuable tool towards those ends, and that the sense of perspective engendered by those efforts is key to the ability to be compassionate with others.

But I use my emotions to navigate life all the time. How do I know that man on the subway seems sketchy, or that this is a street I should avoid walking down alone? Well, I don't "know"-- but I know I ignore those feelings at my peril. How did J and I decide we should get married, or when we should have children? There were no lists of pros and cons involved. In retrospect, we could probably write up a few, but that just isn't how those decisions got made.

How do I know when I'm doing work that makes me feel fulfilled, and when I should start looking for a new job? How do we choose careers? Friends?

We just have a sense for these things. And we can't fully explain how, or why. Scientists and other thinkers are working on being able to answer those questions-- which is something I find exciting. But in the meantime, I'm happy that intelligent people are beginning to validate that there are other ways of knowing about the world-- even if we can't yet explain how they work. And that these other ways are what lie behind most of our most important decisions.

Feelings can be smart.

To one hoopy frood who really knew where his towel was.

It's May 25, and you know what that means--

Happy Towel Day, everyone!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chapter three.

Douglas Adams was a writer, an environmental activist, and a self-described "radical atheist"-- adding radical for emphasis so he would not be asked if he meant agnostic.

He valued integrity, rational thought, and a well-developed sense of the ridiculous-- all qualities that I feel deserve their own special day of celebration. Plus, I've been a fan of his since middle school.

So here I am, towel in hand, ready to face the universe!

[I'd wear it around town today, but... once you've actually spent time in the loony bin, what might normally seem like whimsical humor tends to read as an actual cry for help. So a photo of my good intentions will have to do.]

Douglas Adams had life-long fascinations with both zoology and religion. Richard Dawkins, in a eulogy he gave for his dear friend, back in 2001, had this to say about Adams' views on creationism:
... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

I think Douglas Adams might have gotten a kick out of this video:

Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoyed it, too.

So, as you go about your business today, please take a moment to marvel at the intricacies of life abounding in all its forms, or to laugh at something truly absurd.

And if all else fails, Don't Panic.

Sunday in the Park with George.

Yesterday, J and I met up with our semi-Canadian friend G-- a former classmate and colleague of J's. We went to see the Rem Koolhaas exhibit at The New Museum.

The exhibit was stationed in a former restaurant supply store-- parts of which seemed to remain. The walls and floor appeared to be excavated to varying levels of dilapidation-- according to a museum note, the space, in its arrested development between former industrial business and current gallery, represented a "fake standoff" between authenticity and gentrification.

The exhibit was a sort of portfolio show of Rem Koolhaas' two organizations-- OMA, his architectural firm, and AMO, the branch involved with research and concept development. The show focused on ideas of historical preservation-- how more and more of the Earth's surface is becoming devoted to remaining a monument to parts of our past we've deemed important enough to save. What do we choose to preserve-- the standout or the quotidian? Why? Who decides what's worth saving, and what we should demolish and build over? What do those choices say about our psyches? How do we preserve-- do we renew to a level of perfection the original may never have achieved, or do we allow detritus and decay remain as a document of continuing, living history? When our available resources-- space, money, etc.-- are devoted to preservation, how do we continue to live and grow alongside our history? How do we make room for something new and appropriate to our current needs, while respecting the material culture of the past?

It was an interesting exhibit, though, as I commented to J, it had the feeling of the sorts of exhibits you see in architecture schools-- minus the polish you might expect from a gallery show (though this unfinished quality could easily be considered part of the exhibit-- and certainly emblematic of Koolhaas' style.)

My favorite elements were sections of the former store that seemed to remain (for all I knew, they could have been created for the show-- a sort of set design-- but they seemed authentic): taped-up Polaroids of the family that used to run the supply company-- same faces at different ages, shots from the blackout of 2003, Christmases, children's artwork, newspaper clippings from ball games-- that sort of ordinary but poignant document of a disappeared past. There was furniture from the former CBGB's-- trash-picked desks and chairs covered with decades of punk rock stickers and ads for websites and what-have-you.

But the part of the exhibit I enjoyed the most didn't seem to have much to do with the rest of what was going on-- dilapidation and history-- except that it was recycled from a former OMA project: a giant safety-orange bean-bag, maybe nine feet by nine feet, that I plopped into to read some of the display boards. Sitting on it was like sharing a waterbed-- I bounced up and down as other people flopped on to the bag and got up off of it. The orange was so bright it cast a glow on the skin and clothes of those who got near. It was a very happy object. I told J I wanted one, to replace all our living room furniture. He laughed, and helped me stand up.

It took some doing.

When we'd had enough of the exhibit, we decided to take a quick tour of the rest of the museum galleries (at speed, to avoid art fatigue. If you've spent any time in museums, you probably know what I mean. I'm thinking of Steve Martin, and his roller-skates...)

As has been typical of my experiences with The New Museum (with the exception of the Koolhaas exhibit, which I enjoyed), the exhibits left me cold. Nothing intriguing, disturbing, startlingly well-crafted, ugly, or beautiful to speak of. I'd recount what we saw, but the prospect has me bored already.

We did visit the sky room, and an upper terrace, that I'd never seen before. I like panoramic views of the city, even if they're in the wrong direction and the day is gray and chilly. And I do like the building itself-- steel mesh boxes stacked like presents, filled with interesting, narrow stairs and a couple rather lovely tiled bathrooms.

After our tour, we went out for an early dinner, at a pub somewhere in Soho. Conversation was congenial and amusing, and ranged from the failed Rapture on Saturday to the possibility of astronauts impregnating each other in zero gravity.

Would the sperm be able to swim in the right direction? Would a fertilized egg be able to fall out of the fallopian tubes and implant without gravitational assistance? The men thought yes-- though my husband seemed to think lying down was equivalent to defying gravity, which I found strange.

I'm not convinced.

Well, if NASA has no plans to fund the necessary experiments (maybe they have already? Seems it wouldn't be too hard to find willing participants in the study...)

...anyway, if science won't tackle these questions, maybe art can. It's certainly fertile ground for exploration. And it's not too hard to think up some interesting installations...

happy new year, everyone! (updated, with clues.)

as a gift to those of you in the know,
richard dawkins IS keyser soze (?!)
it's TRUE!!!

it's a work in progress. as am i. and that's a good thing. so come on and take a look around, if you're interested.

and YOU were there ! and YOU were there,
a n d - -- -*

with very merry xmas wishes from meme noelle.

(clap your hands if you believe!)

hint: links are e v e r y w h e r e, if you know where to look. click a r o u n d. maybe you'll meet me there?

From beyond the ether -- part deux .

A note to the curious --

There are directions to the abandoned garage where I am building my unholy machine, hidden somewhere. .. in this very weblog ( ! )

Now, go! Go - -- -

You have enough of my. . . se-crrretsss. ..