The Last Word On Nothing

Within the last three years, two of my closer university friends have died. I moved away from Toronto a decade ago, and with those moves I was less frequently in touch with my college friends, but I always assumed we could go on picking up where we left off whenever I was in town. In attending their memorials and hearing more about their lives, I marvel at the changes they made since I lived nearby.

One friend who was unlucky in love all through university met his true match shortly before a rare cancer struck and separated them forever. The friend who died this month once enthused to me that if he put a phone book on his lap, he could eat his Kraft dinner straight out of a hot pot. But in the final years before his fatal drug overdose, he apparently took up cooking as a hobby.  Continue reading →

Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language.

Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic early expressions of desire, “Love,” and “NO!”, and “I” and “Want.”

Most of us probably remember our first word in our native language, but I doubt many of us can remember a time when we knew so few words that we had to expand their definitions to cover an entire universe of necessary expression. When the word “Mom,” depending on how we said it, had to stand for everything from fear to hunger to whatever as-yet-inscrutable emotion was blowing through us.

I know I don’t remember. I work with words for a living. When I want to say, for example, that I’m cold, I have dizzying array of synonyms and phrases to call upon, each with different connotations and levels of extremity. I could be chilly or frigid, freezing or frosty, even glacial, hoary, icy, wintry, or just plain numb-lipped-club-footed-broken-fingered cold.

Then, I spent two weeks in Chile’s Atacama Desert this January. Only three of my five companions spoke English. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at based on context and hand gesture. Or from incessantly badgering the English speakers to help me out.

When Fernando grew tired of translating, he would turn to me and say drily, as if casting a spell, “By the end of this trip, you will be fluent in Spanish.” Continue reading →

March 12 – 16, 2018

Raise your kids to ask questions and they do.  Lots of questions.  Many many questions, many of which require you to decide something.  Emma lists every question and you could get tired just reading them.  Commenters also frazzled.

Michelle find a guy who sonifies weather data.  That is, he takes the numbers — temp, humidity, pressure, wind, rain, all the numbers — and turns them into sound, not music exactly but something more internal.

On a dig, Craig watches archeologists first discover, then backfill Native American remains. Then he tries describing what he sees and it turns out the only way is with poetry:  “Where I keep whispering, shhh, we were never here…”

Erik, man of science or at least science adjacent, dedicated to making decisions based on evidence and solid data, takes his little kid for childhood vaccinations and falls apart into a fear-ridden, emotional mess.

Oh my, Rebecca.  She looks for a word, can’t find one, makes up her own, a word we never knew we even needed but we do and more with each passing day, for the quality of grieving what’s not yet gone.

This story ran last year after an especially turbulent trip to the pediatrician. It has since appeared in a different form on the NPR Shots blog. I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic and facts.

As such, I like to think that I eschew my beliefs for what the facts tell me. As a very young man, I was very taken by the promise of herbal supplements. But as I came to understand the data (or lack thereof) behind them, I gave up on them. I used to worry about GMOs affecting my health until I dug into the actual science and realized that they are totally harmless (though not necessarily great for developing economies). I’m embarrassed to admit it, but in my overwhelmingly white college I thought that America was post-racial. But well-crafted arguments and data showed me I was wrong.

In every case, I abandoned what I thought for what I could prove. I try to keep an open mind and I tell myself I am ruled by logic. This was the mantra for my book on suggestibility and has become a guiding principle not just in my career but in my life.

It’s also utter self-delusion. The sight of one little needle turns me into a raging anti-vaxxer.

Continue reading →