Hugs, Interrupted

By: | July 26, 2021

Early on in the pandemic, a few days before Switzerland’s first lockdown, participants in an international colloquium arrived in Basel and immediately started to flounder as they tried to navigate new norms for social interaction: 

“Hey,” said one conference-goer to another, waving. 

“Are you doing the elbow thing? Or are you doing the other thing?” her fellow asked. 

The first person extended her right toe, and the other reciprocated, completing a right foot-bump. Person One then presented her left foot, but Person Two got flustered, responding late and using the right foot twice. To researchers observing a video of the exchange, the second woman’s delay indicated that she was a “novice” foot-bumper.

I stumbled on these tales of footsie faux pas in a study published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. The paper is part of an ongoing project at the University of Basel, in which researchers are trying to understand how greetings like handshakes and hugs have changed over the course of the pandemic, using videos of interactions in the university, parks, shops, and markets. Early in the pandemic, greetings like hugs and handshakes went from routine to “hesitated, suspended, and yet still completed,” the team found. But as the pandemic progressed, the same gestures were “resisted, refused,” and ultimately abandoned. (Example: Someone named Eva tries to hug someone named Rick. Rick waggles his index finger at her and clicks his tongue in disapproval. Eva laughs, lowers her arms, and shrugs.)

Eventually, some social groups adopted novel rituals, like air hugs and toe taps, to replace the riskier options. But wasn’t easy for people to learn these new modes of greeting, and the interactions often read like experimental theatrical productions with avante garde staging — the characters could be speaking from the insides of dustbins or buried in the ground, like in Samuel Beckett’s plays. In another transcript, poor Person Two (Ariane below) attempts once again to greet people properly after watching people named Denise and Chuck elbow-bump, and finds only existential confusion:

Ariane: Is this the new, uh. This is the new style?
Chuck: Heh heh.
Ariane: It happens very fast. We all need to progress.
Denise: Yeah.
Ariane: So I was talking with Joan earlier. We were this…(extends right arm)… Do we hug or do we not hug?
Denise: Heh hah.
Chuck: I don’t know.
(Ariane makes a ‘hugging’ gesture, both arms.)
Ariane: Yeah, you have to ask.
Chuck: I don’t know.
Denise: Hah hah. (Moves both elbows.)

There’s nothing surprising about the study’s findings, or even new, it was published more than a year ago. But I read the disjointed transcripts over and over because they feel to me like how I and many of the friends and colleagues I’ve talked to lately are feeling: no longer able to rely on the new norms and habits we established during the pandemic, but not yet able to go back to the old ones, either. Emerging from our pandemic chrysalises, we less like glittering social butterflies than hesitant, vulnerable larvae, uncertain what’s acceptable or safe to do. We need time to develop new boundaries, routines, and rituals — all of which, we know, will be subject to rapid change.

When a concept like an “air hug” acquires new layers of meaning, I recently learned, linguists describe it as “sedimentation,” as if gestures and symbols and the meanings and feelings that accrue to them are like the particles of silt that cumulatively change a river’s course and tell its story. Who knows if we’ll come out of this pandemic as foot-bumpers or elbow-tappers or air huggers, or if all these coping strategies will wash out over time. But I find the idea of sedimentation kind of appealing: If nothing else, it suggests that disorienting array of social options we’re exploring together will settle down and add up to something someday.

Notes from a constituent

By: | July 23, 2021
Catherine McKenna swooshes out of a building

Canada’s politics are stable enough that I can afford to be, more or less, a single-issue voter. Six years ago, I wrote to the incoming member of parliament for my riding – a candidate for whom I did not vote.

“Dear Ms. McKenna:

Congratulations on your new position as our Member of Parliament.

My parents live across the street from you, and I grew up there when Celia Franca lived in the little house next door to you. [various other personal details]. I’m a science journalist and author.

I went to your website during the campaign, and the issues your video talked about were more local than my own focus, so I ultimately voted for the Green Party. However, you will have my full support and campaign engagement in the next election if you do one thing during your current term: Agitate consistently for immediate action on the climate crisis.

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About a Shell

By: | July 21, 2021

Earlier this month, I was walking along the beach in an sunrise fog when I saw a perfect sand dollar on the sand. I held it in my palm for a moment, debating: would I crush it between here and home? By taking it off the beach, would I bring some other misfortune, to someone else who was looking for the shells, or to the beach or the sea, which might need the sand dollar for an unknown purpose? I set it down and walked on, but still my mind rolled over the pale circle of a shell, so light in my hand, the shape of the feathery five-pointed star engraved on its front.

Cynthia Barnett, a science writer from Florida, shares the same fascination for what the tide washes up in her new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. The writing follows the spiraling design of a nautilus shell, moving from the earliest known forms of shelled creatures, found in the limestone and black shale of a remote mountain range on the Alaska-Canada border, to the uses of shells through time and toward their future, with shells and their inhabitants threatened by habitat destruction, microplastics, and a warming and acidifying ocean.

One of the examples Barnett gives is of the sea butterflies, marine snails that swim, gracefully, using their wing-like feet. As the ocean soaks in more carbon dioxide, it becomes more acidic—and this is already dissolving these butterflies’ shells. A 2014 study found that more than half of the sea butterflies sampled along the coast from California to Washington had severely dissolved shells.

“A shell too is a home, and the life’s work of the animal that secretes it layer by layer with minerals from the surrounding environment,” Barnett writes.  I’d never heard of sea butterflies before, but suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about them, swimming along as the homes they’d built disintegrated around them  

Then, the sea butterflies appeared again, a day later, when I started reading The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. This book is full of maps, each painted (by artist and writer Christina Conklin) on a sheet of sea lettuce, each showing how different aspects of climate change are affecting a different place on the globe. I stopped on a map of projected surface pH in the 2090s, painted in fiery ink on a piece of sea lettuce that looks like weathered parchment. On the opposite page, Conklin and co-author Marina Psaros write about the sea butterflies again, saying that researchers had not expected to see the effect of the water’s increasing acidity as soon as they did.

Taken together, this makes me wonder what kind of home we are making for ourselves here. Will it be, thousands of years from now, something that a child—human, alien, anyone—will hold up to the light and admire? Or have we already dissolved the world around us too much to repair?

Barrett seems to suggest we might look to the shells before we, too, dissolve in despair.

Both sea butterflies and the nautilus are survivors—their ancestors weathered the most recent global mass extinction and the changing seas that came along with it. Shells, she writes, “take carbon from the sea and make it beauty.”

I don’t know how to do that yet. But as I turned for home, the clouds lifted behind me and I saw that there were dozens of sand dollar shells along the shore that I hadn’t noticed on the way out.  I picked up one more and held it in the palm of my hand, where it felt fragile, and also strong. It is sitting on the corner of my desk now, like the compass rose on a map that is still being drawn.

*

Sea butterfly photo by Russ Hopcroft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Bee Hunt

By: | July 19, 2021
A cicada on a flowering plant
That is not a bee

Earlier this summer I went on a bee hunt.

I’m talking about native bees, not honeybees. In the words of Sam Droege, the guy leading the bee hunt, “If your model of ‘bee’ is the honeybee, you need to forget nearly everything you know about bees.” Droege works at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab in Maryland.

Honeybees were brought to the U.S. from Europe. They’re basically livestock, Droege says. Thinking that a honeybee is a good representative of bees is like thinking a cow is a good representation of mammals. A cow is a fine animal. But knowing things about cows is not going to tell you much about squirrels or lemurs or bats.

The bee lab concerns itself with the more interesting and diverse native bees. The U.S. has some 4,000 species of native bees. They don’t make honey. They don’t do waggle dances. Most are solitary. Some are striped black and yellow, but a lot aren’t. Some are a brilliant metallic green.

A group of local science writers visited the lab for a tour, and Droege put us to work. He showed us how to swish a net and catch a bee, then transfer it into a tube of soapy water. Each pair of us was assigned to look for bees visiting the flowers of either annual fleabane, the cute daisy relative pictured above, or elderberry. He wants to know which supports more bees.

Droege has a hypothesis: while elderberry seeds are included in a lot of supposedly pollinator-friendly seed packets, he doesn’t have a good feeling about it. “I think it’s – personally, because I hunt bees all the time – a crappy bee plant,” he said.

We wandered through the paths mowed between the meadows, admiring the crop of poison ivy and wondering how many ticks were climbing up our pants. I swished the net past a bee on a flower and slammed the rim down to the ground; it climbed to the top of the net, like Droege said it would, and my friend Kate got it into the tube. Later we caught another. The fields were filled with plant-swatting science writers.

We caught bees and, as it turned out, ticks. We were just a small part of the answer to this question, and I haven’t heard the answer yet. A few bees met their end, and science advanced.

Photo: Helen Fields

Snapshot: Habituated ground squirrel

By: | July 16, 2021

On the roadside the ground squirrel snacked

The remains of a lunch, he attacked

Now he’s developed a taste

For anthropogenic food waste

Beware, lest you be rodent carjacked.

Science Metaphors (cont.): the Ideal Gas

By: | July 14, 2021

I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the universe’s every detail, occasionally uses a phrase that turns out to be a metaphor useful for sorting out our own disorderly lives. I have a small, harmless obsession with science’s metaphors.

The question/comment comes from people who are grieving but aren’t sure they’re allowed to. Psychology calls this “disenfranchised grief.” My father died, these people say. Then they remember that my son died and they say, what I feel doesn’t even compare, does it, isn’t it so much worse for you? Or they say an old aunt died but she was very old; or a neighbor’s husband died but we weren’t that close; or a colleague from work died or a dog or cat died; or they’ve divorced or a child won’t speak to them; or a friend they’ve had for years died but he was just a friend. Except now they feel so sad, their lives are darkened, they keep thinking about this loss but they’re not sure whether they can even tell anyone about it, does it even count as grief? Psychology does have answers which involve checklists of symptoms and their severity from 1 to 5, etc., and the upshot is what you already know: yes, some losses are harder to carry than others and yes, what you’re feeling is grief. But chemistry has an answer too, and I like this one better.

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June Gloom

By: | July 12, 2021

Ok so we missed this by a month, we’re sorry but what is time anyway. Maybe in this flat hot relentless July, we could use a little June Gloom! (Or as reader Michael McKee has heard it called in the Pacific Northwest, Juneuary.) The gloom can be pretty glorious, making the beginning of summer one of hot chocolates and fuzzy blankets. This post originally appeared in 2012—and like June Gloom, it just keeps coming back every year.

**

I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were boring. And now that’s me, commiserating with neighbors about the state of our sky, which gave us a glorious, bluebird May and then rolled out a thick cloud carpet on the first day of June.

June Gloom isn’t just a Southern California phenomenon, and it doesn’t only happen in June. But perhaps we give it a name (and May Gray, and, in dire situations, No-sky July and Fogust) because we complain about it the most. The response from an Oregonian friend who visited this week: “Talk to the hand.”

(When I later looked at the Wikipedia entry for June Gloom, the authors concurred: “A similar phenomenon can occur in the Pacific Northwest between May and early July, though the phrase “June Gloom” is not nearly as commonly heard as it is in California due to the frequency of cloudy or overcast weather throughout the year in the Pacific Northwest.”)

Sam Iacobellis at Scripps Institution of Oceanography talked me through how SoCal’s gloom works.  Different parts of the coast offer their own complications, but generally speaking, the cold Pacific water—aided and abetted by the California Current and the upwelling—and a high pressure region, the Pacific High, conspire to form the marine layer clouds that some of us call gloom.

Usually, the atmosphere gets colder as you head up. But the cold water creates a situation where the air near the water’s surface is colder than the air above it: an inversion. The Pacific High pushes air downward, compressing it and warming it. Together, this forms a stable inversion air that can hold a layer of cloud near the water’s surface like an older brother crouching on an upstart sibling.

Gloom often dissipates in the afternoon, as sunshine warms air near the surface. The warmer air mixes into the clouds and starts to break them up.

Of course, there’s a lot more than that going on, too. The gloom is the home of a wild kind of cloud field called actinoform clouds, which, to a satellite’s eye, look like enormous leaves or pinwheels. And the ocean itself might be providing more than just cold water. Iodide released by kelp may turn into cloud condensation nuclei, which could make clouds thicker and more pervasive.

All this fascinating stuff doesn’t prevent me from being boring. But I also think I was a bit too harsh on weather as a conversational topic. Yes, it is something to talk about when there’s nothing left to say. Yet it’s also a shared experience that has the potential to affect everyone.

When someone I don’t know very well says, “this weather is making me crazy,” I feel like I really do understand, more than if she talked about how her kids or parents or work was setting her teeth on edge.

Weather connects me to other times, too. I can imagine the Chumash, who lived on this coast long before the rest of us showed up, standing on the bluffs when the clouds start to break up. Those first rays of sunshine feel so needed that it almost feels like my skin is consuming them; I wonder if one of them felt this way, too.

Even when the gloom doesn’t lift all day, there are ways to enjoy it. There’s a contest that’s been going on for the last ten years or so among a few Scripps employees to guess the number of gloomy days in May and June.

I asked if there was any trick to forecasting gloom. Events that affect sea surface temperature, from the El Niño/La Niña cycles to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation may play a role in the amount of gloom. Iacobellis says the contest is really a crapshoot, but it also has a way of making the gloom seem less gloomy. Each cloud-covered day is one step closer to victory.

Each gloomy day, too, is a chance to think about what’s happening out there:  cold water, enormous swirls of clouds, that lunk of an inversion layer pinning the gray above our heads. Watch out, neighbors, here I come. And now I have even more to talk about.

Today’s playlist:  Crowded House, Weather With You; Len, Steal My Sunshine; The Like, June Gloom

***

Images  Top: Eric Gangnath  Middle: marya  Bottom: Steve Lyon

I Know Astrology Is Bullshit, But I Can’t Stop Reading My Horoscope

By: | July 9, 2021

I used to snicker at people who religiously read their daily horoscopes. Astrology is not science. Not even close. “No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates,” some exasperated person at NASA wrote in a Tumblr post debunking a rumor that NASA had changed the zodiac signs.

I share that NASA communicator’s irritation. (If NASA hasn’t convinced you, the University of California Museum of Paleontology has created a handy checklist to help you determine whether astrology is scientific. Spoiler: it’s not.) Yet I’ve also come to understand why people got hooked. One day last year while wrestling with my book writing, I accidentally read the horoscopes in my local paper and realized that they were actually just snippets of useful writing advice dressed up as astrological wisdom.

And that’s how I began reading Holiday Mathis’s syndicated horoscopes with an eye toward finding answers to my creative conundrums. Here are a few of the insights that I found.

Crucial advice when you’re struggling to begin a creative project — if you wait until you have it all figured out, you’ll never start.

This one reads like a card from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. You’re stuck… try this.

Here’s a siren to heed the call of that passion project I’ve been putting off.

Totally solid advice for a woman (or anyone else) writing on the internet these days.

This one reads like a description of some of my most productive reporting trips.

Do you see what I’m doing? I’m taking advice and insights from Holiday Mathis and projecting them onto my own life. This is what makes astrology so enticing.

Look, I know that astrology is nonsense and there’s nothing particular to me here. But I gotta admire Holiday’s talent. I’m an avid collector of creative prompts like Lynda Barry’s incredible books, Austin Kleon’s blog, Susan G. Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy and Ann Lamott’s classic, Bird by Bird. But what makes the personalized daily messages from Miz Mathis so alluring is that she writes them as though she’s speaking directly to me.   

I wanted to know who this creative fortune teller was, so I sent her an email and asked if I could call. She passed on the phone call, but sent me a 2,000 word response to my questions. She started writing horoscopes in 1991 after answering an ad on a college bulletin board. “I don’t even know what made me think I could write horoscopes except that I had read a trillion of them in Cosmo and Seventeen mags,” she says. Next thing she knew, she was working “through the mail, sending in floppy disks and getting a checks in return from a ‘Linda Twitchel.’” She didn’t ask questions.

Eventually she met Joyce Jillson (“Linda Twitchel” was a pseudonym) — an actress, socialite, best-selling author and syndicated astrologer. Jillson had discovered that “writing horoscopes en masse is no easy gig” so she hired Mathis and several other writers to help. Eventually it was just Mathis writing all the horoscopes, and when Jillson died in 2004, she took over the column.

“The column averages 7,500 words a week. It’s about 900 words for each day of the week,” Mathis says, “and then another 1,200 for the week ahead.” She estimates that she’s written about “5,070,000 words published as Holiday Mathis and at least 3,000,000 ghost written for Joyce Jillson.” It adds up to a little more than 8 million words. No wonder she’s amassed so much writing advice.

She’s also pretty good at existential angst. “I have published over 8 million words, and what do I have to show for it? No best seller or movie version of the work. No Wikipedia page. I make a modest living and I have never gone on an extended vacation,” she says. She has a weekly deadline, and she’s come to see her work as “a spiritual practice. I am like those monks who create sand mandalas to be briefly enjoyed by the passersby and tossed to the river at the end of the day.”

“The fact that nobody is going to care about it tomorrow, or even an hour from now, that’s liberating,” she says. I asked if there was a formula, and she says no. “It’s more of an intention. I want to create a tiny poem for each sign.”

She doesn’t know how she filters all her random sources of inspiration into the words of a horoscope, but says, “the muses favor me. I believe the muses favor me for the same reason that Joyce Jillson did: I’m desperate. I’m game. I show up.” She notes that “turning in this column is how I buy food, and I like to eat. That helps. I don’t ever have writer’s block – I don’t even believe in it – because I can’t afford to.”

What I most wanted to ask her was whether she really believes in astrology. “The astrology is a given. I read the ephemeris and offer an interpretation,” she says. “The symbols are playful invitations to do my best… they are chiefs in my pantheon of muses.” She views them as characters — “Big Daddy Jupiter and the Venus the strumpet, or maybe she’s in her maternal mode, wearing a gown by Virgo or a pantsuit by Capricorn.”

She went on:

I’m sure a versed science writer such as yourself is well-aware that humans are notoriously uncomfortable with randomness. Our brains have evolved to filter out most of it, so all that gets through are the threats, the changes, and a small amount of “other” which we are compelled to make order out of… look for a pattern, come up with a theory, construct a narrative, dig into a belief about…

I am just like everyone else, bringing all I know into looking for the pattern. The pattern I’m looking for in the context of the horoscope column is one that will help people settle in to a positive feeling about the day. One that will make people feel seen and understood. Make them feel like they belong in this cluster of humanity under one sky.

I read this answer to mean that Mathis doesn’t truly believe in astrology, but when I showed her reply to a friend, she had the opposite reaction — “oh yeah, she totally believes in it.”

Which gets me to my ultimate conclusion about Holiday Mathis and about horoscopes more broadly — they aim to give us what we’re seeking. Some days my sign’s horoscope isn’t speaking to me, and so I read through the list to find one that does. I don’t actually care which sign I take from. I know that this is just generic advice that can mean whatever I want it to. I think of these daily horoscopes much like Holiday does — as “A candy snack to set the day on a sweet note. A personal nudge toward levity or introspection or fun or kindness or wisdom.”

This post first ran on May 11, 2018, but I have since interviewed Holiday Mathis and discovered that she is even more delightful than I could have ever imagined. You can listen to my interview with her on this episode of Emerging Form, my podcast about creativity. Episode link: https://emergingform.substack.com/p/episode-28-the-daily-grind-with-holiday