Deadly Dancing

I'm rather fond of recut trailers, and this one amused me...

If David Lynch had filmed "Dirty Dancing."

"Lynchian" is almost a cliché these days, but it still amuses me, especially when fused to something like "Dirty Dancing."

Flurry

We got some snow yesterday; just a dusting, really, nothing terribly exciting. Today's primary election day, so I'll do my civic duty, as ever. Not terribly sanguine about the mayoral prospects; I know who is most likely to win, but I don't want that candidate to win. We'll see how it goes. There are some real snakes in this election.

Speaking of snakes: the search for giant anacondas! Woo hoo!

Toof

Aww, B2's first loose tooth. My younger boy's finally losing his baby teeth! *bittersweet*

Trouble with Quibbles

Watched some of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- the boys love the starship fights in that one...

Enterprise v. Reliant

Anyway, watching Khan deploy the Genesis Device, it occurred to me that Kirk need only to have beamed a few people aboard the crippled Reliant (since he had declared to Khan to "prepare to be boarded.") and then just fire a phaser or two at the Genesis Device, disintegrating it -- since it's already been well-established that phasers can disintegrate any number of things, it seems logical that a phaser could simply eradicate the Genesis Device in a nimbus of plasma or whatever it is that phasers turn matter into.

And if even that's not good enough for you, how about another old standby: the Genesis Device is sitting in the transporter bay of the Reliant, and Khan is busy dying on the bridge, all of his crew slain. So, Kirk et al. need only beam the Genesis Device up and keep it in suspension -- as Chekhov puts it in "Day of the Dove" -- "Nonexistence; that's exactly what they deserve."

No Genesis Device detonation, no death of Spock, no problem. Of course, since the plot points in "...Khan" were milked for two other Trek movies, that might pose problems for them, too, and lacks the dramatic, Ahabesque finale for Khan, and the drama of Spock's (temporary) death in the service of the Enterprise.

Just the same, though, it bugs me that two simple methods of dealing with the Genesis Device weren't considered, and, instead, Kirk just defaulted to getting the hell out of there.

It's like one of my frustrations in "The Empire Strikes Back" (certainly the best of the actually good "Star Wars" movies) where the snowspeeders repeatedly try frontal assaults on the AT-ATs (the Imperial Walkers), even though it's clear that their primary weapons are on the front. Luke et al. continue to charge the AT-ATs head-on, and (big shock) take heavy casualties because of it. Why not lateral attacks, back and forth, from side-to-side, avoiding those big guns? Next you're going to tell me the Rebels are going to use trench warfare against the AT-ATs. Oh, wait....

Marginally related to the above...

Star Trek: The Sexed Generation

This is a masterpiece of editing! Given that the piece is nearly 10 minutes long, they had to have worked for a very long time to compile this.

Today

Happy President's Day! Woo hoo! Yeah!

Today I have to wrangle with one of the utilities, get a SNAFU all sorted out. Good times. It should be the kind of thing that could be fixed in about 30 seconds, if I end up with somebody paying attention and being meticulous. If I end up with an F Trooper, though, it may be more of an ordeal. We'll see.

(later)

Well, that was quick. They're closed for President's Day. Alright, then.

Bleah

Kind of in the doldrums today. Just battling a cold, winter appears to have remembered that it's not over yet, and I've been cleaning the apartment. Nothing terribly exciting, but it's left me a feeling of being both down and restive.

Two Words

"Thin Mints."

That is all.

I bought a cache of five boxes of Thin Mints yesterday. Mmm!

Wonder Woman

Saw this display while out and about today. Yeah, Wonder Woman, beat that fashion-challenged Medusa! Defeat Medusa's "Drab Ray..."

Gruh.

Guh. Yesterday was annoying. Just some logistical stuff I have to deal with. One of the utilities is being obstinate and unhelpful, so I have to try to sort that out Monday (since their offices are closed on the weekend, naturally).

Had a sweet moment last night, when doing the kid transfer -- B2 said "Wait a second." and ran back to me and gave me a huge hug. I loved that. B1 followed suit. It touched me, because when I'd heard him say "Wait a second...." I had thought there was some toy or something that he'd forgotten, but he'd just wanted a goodbye hug. So sweet.

One of the bad effects of this momentary warming trend in the weather is the building's ample heat is momentarily off, so the place is chilly. I've been living in flannel the past couple of days. This usually happens in March -- what I call March Madness -- like as it gets less cold outside, landlords tend to dial back on the heat, even though it's still frickin' freezing. Anyway, I'm almost grateful for a return to normal cold, as it'll mean the heat comes back on properly.

I've been working on lots of queries. Trying to craft queries around three novels at the moment. I really loathe query-writing. I don't like it anymore than I like writing cover letters. It's a vital, necessary adjunct to professional writing, but it's still irksome. So, today I'll sling a bunch of those out. I'm opting for snail mail, just because I think it might have more resonance, oddly enough, to get a physical object, versus an e-submission. Even if it means including the dreaded SASE, my least-favorite thing.

Warm and Cold

Definitely have a cold, right on the tail of getting over the flu. That's irritating. I just feel blechy in general. Wish I didn't have to go anywhere, but I have to get the boys where they need to be. So far they seem healthy (hell, one of them probably gave the cold to me to begin with, the lil' stinkers!) I'm just swilling lots of orange juice and trying to stay warm. I'll try to get some writing done while I'm reasonably fresh.

Quirky

Ooh, the science of heartlessness! Sounds like a worthwhile read. I'd warn people about it not being a how-to book, but odds are the truly heartless already know, and don't need a book to learn any new tricks! Funny how oxytocin is tied to the fear response -- that the less oxytocin someone has, the more fearful they tend to be, less trusting, empathic, and giving...

We've all encountered people with such divergent attitudes toward suffering -- and it often brings up a rather prickly question: Why are some of us bleeding hearts while others have hearts of stone? Science actually provides us with a number of clues.

A Dutch team, for example, has looked at how oxytocin, a hormone frequently associated with female reproduction, influences parenting styles. Dutch scientists watched as a bunch of mothers interacted with their two-year-old children, who were trying to solve a difficult puzzle. Some mothers were patient and helpful; others were not. And the not-so-helpful mothers were more likely to carry a particular version of the oxytocin receptor gene: Their "mommy chemical" system may have been set just a tad to the selfish side, slightly blinding them to the emotions of their children.


Now further studies are finding that oxytocin can increase the amount of money people will donate to a charity. One study in particular lent credence to the time honored method charities use to pull money from magazine readers: Feature a woebegone child in your advertisement. In the study, researchers had subjects watch a tearjerker film of a father talking about his son's brain tumor. They sampled subjects' blood before and after the film. Following the film the blood was awash in oxytocin, and their donations to charity rose 47 percent, compared to those of subjects who saw a film of the same father talking about a trip to the zoo. The tearjerker technique was more effective on women than men. Experiments wherein people sniff oxytocin to bolster the chemical in their brain show that the chemical may work in two ways. It may operate first by dampening our natural fear of one another. Oxytocin is very active in the amygdala, which monitors the world for danger. Extra oxytocin fights fear. Then, with that terror out of the way, perhaps it's easier to read another person's emotions and relate to them. People dosed with oxytocin make more direct eye contact, and they are better at describing the emotions portrayed on another's face. So extra oxytocin also helps us to empathize.

But humans have access to another brain system that raises sympathy, too. When you stick out your tongue at a baby, the baby will often stick its tongue out automatically. The motor region of the baby's brain is mirroring your own motor region. Our emotional regions also have a system that helps us to mirror another's feelings. Although many scientists refer to this system as "mirror neurons," referring to brain cells that reproduce other people's emotions in our own brain, that's speculation.

Mirror neurons do exist in monkeys, that's established. When scientists monitored one nerve cell at a time to see how one monkey responded to a second monkey's actions, they found that some neurons fire just as if the watching monkey were performing the action himself. Whether a monkey reaches for food or merely watches another monkey reach for food, his neurons fire identically. Scientists can confirm mirror neurons in monkeys because they're allowed to slip superfine wires into a monkey's brain and tap into one cell at a time. They can't get a permit to do that to humans.

Patsy, the giver of furniture, and I sometimes joke that we have too many mirror neurons. For bleeding hearts like us it's a struggle to keep other people's emotions out of our heads. Your pain is my pain. Everyone's pain is my pain. I've learned to watch only happy movies, and to avert my eyes from advertisements for animal charities. If I didn't throw a blanket over the mirror neurons I'd spend the whole day in tears. When researchers use MRI to hunt for a mirror neuron system in humans, they argue over what they see. Compared to monitoring a single cell with a wire, MRI yields a grainy picture. There is plenty of room for interpretation. Some think a couple of structures in the middle layers of the brain behave in a mirrorlike way. But others see two distinct types of neurons -- one for watching, another for acting.

That we have some kind of mirroring system is common sense. A means of automatically mimicking another animal's behavior would speed the learning process. And certainly it would help to explain how one animal can feel empathy for another. It would also explain how effortlessly, subconsciously, we empathize with a sad face or a happy face. Your mirror system would reproduce inside you the emotions you saw in someone else. Right now we can say that oxytocin seems to make a human more sensitive to others' emotions, but we can't say how.

That Dutch study of how mothers helped their children, however, is central to the evolution of sympathy. On its face, it seems so cold and sad that some mothers can't take their child's point of view. It seems so unmaternal that they scold instead of praising, that they dominate instead of guiding. Human mothers, we're often told, are selfless creatures dedicated entirely to the health and welfare of their offspring. They're not snakes who give birth and glide away. These selfish women must have no empathy, sympathy, or decency!

But that ignores the fact that a mother -- every mother, whether snake, skunk, or sheep -- has biological aspirations above and beyond an infant. In her DNA she dreams of launching not one, but a dozen offspring down the river of time. And to do that she has to watch out for her own health and welfare.

All mothers and their infants engage in a battle over this issue, from the moment of conception. It is in the offspring's best interest to drag every nutrient and calorie it can absorb out of its mother's body. It is in the mother's best interest to hold something back so that she can raise future offspring. This battle continues after birth. An infant denied the opportunity to nurse does not quit without a fight. She'll let loose wails that in earlier times could attract deadly predators.

But no matter how sympathetic a mother might be, the infant won't gain the upper hand in this contest. Starvation remains a real threat to humans today, and the photographs that come out of refugee camps testify to the importance of motherly selfishness. Still strong enough to walk, mothers embrace their dying children. I'm sure they wish they could nurse their children, but evolution has outfitted them with bodies that will not permit it. When a female's body fat drops below a certain point, she can continue to empathize with her child's pain, but her body refuses to sympathize: Her body stops producing milk. And how could it be otherwise? Why would evolution reward a body that would give its last calorie to an offspring, then die and leave the offspring to starve alone? The offspring of such sympathetic mothers don't survive, and neither do the genes that would make a person so disastrously generous.

But neither could evolution produce mothers who would abandon an infant at the first sign of hardship. Evolution rewards those mothers who invest in their existing offspring but guard their ability to have more children in the future.

And the dynamic would not be much different for men. Human infants are so useless that they require twenty-four-hour protection for a number of years after birth. Many hands make light work, and they also make for more surviving babies. Males who are inspired to pitch in with child care increase the odds that their own genetic legacy will grow healthy and strong.

The contrast between Patsy and Robin highlights the fact that humans come in many shades of cooperativeness. Why would that be? Why does evolution perpetuate both the pushovers and the pushers? Well, a personality that's low in sympathy or empathy is not a heartless block of stone. She just isn't so quick to assume the feelings of others. She does a better job of maintaining her boundaries and keeping a steady eye on her own future. Undistracted by life's melodramas, she's more likely to focus on facts and figures.

Nor is the bleeding heart (ahem) a boundaryless ball of mush. Well, maybe she is. Maybe it's a real challenge for her to say no, because she can feel the impact of that hard word on another's psyche. Maybe she's sucked into drama after drama because she cannot walk away from a soul in distress. But because she is what we think of as "a good friend" she also has a large circle of humans that ensure she has a healthy balance of laughter and martinis in her life.

Melted

The city's insane amount of snow is nearly all gone, now, thanks to the unseasonably, surely global-warmingly-induced warmth. Of course, this is the grossest time to be in the city, just because of all the detritus that's locked into those dirty snowbanks, the endless grunge in the melt-off. Blech. Fortunately, the city's streetsweepers are gradually getting on the case, but right now, it's very gross.

I said to B2, "We need a good storm to come in and wash the streets." and he said "I would rather have a BILLION fans blow it all away." That was cute, the enthusiasm with which he said that, evocative turns of his arms.

Muse

So, I decided which book to finalize next. It's one I've wrestled with off and on since 2006 or 2007. It's at over 73,000 words right now, and'll probably be closer to 80-90,000 words before I've finalized it. I've done about four revisions on it. It's a weird case for me, because the book's been written, but I never quite felt the notes were pitch-perfect in it, which is why I've worked on it sporadically all of these years. It's my "problem child" of books -- whereas others I've written I just know when they're done, when I did this one, it was more "THE END?" instead of "THE END." Heh. Back when I still let Exene read my work, this was one of two books where she just hated the protagonist (and wouldn't finish the book, despite asking to read it in the first place -- which is like a cardinal sin to a writer, which, back then, gave me pause (back when I actually listened to her opinions, god help me). But, on revising and rereading it, I realized that the protagonist was just fine, and Exene just didn't like the character because they were strongly-defined, had a strong sense of who they were (funny, that).

At any rate, I'm finally going to "solve" the "problem" of this book, which really focuses on the pacing of it and the ending, having it build properly to the endpoint. I'm still unsure whether it qualifies as a Young Adult story (it certainly could), or whether it's simply a magic realist kind of contemporary story -- the reason that's blurred to me is that, in our society, adults aren't nearly so adult, anymore. I've seen 20- and 30-somethings who are still effectively children in adult bodies. I know "New Adult" gets bandied about in publishing as a category -- maybe this is a "New Adult" novel. Not sure. It's got a bit of an Oprah Book vibe to it, so if I can get representation for it, maybe there'll be hope for it.

The title was something I deliberately conceived as a kind of wry nod to the Oprah Book reader, so if it ever got picked up by that set, I would be laughing all the way to the bank, having proved another literary theory of mine.