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.

Aww...

I had something sweet happen while picking up B1 from school -- one of the older moms came over and said "I wanted to say that I see you walking your boy to school every day, and he just looks so happy to be with you. Just thought I'd tellya." I thanked her. It was a nice thing to say, quite out of the blue, left me a little bashful. Made my day.

My Darling Clementine

Happy to report that my clementine sapling is doing fine, and even has some new sprigs. I need to dust off its leaves, clearly, but it's doing well. I'll get it a new pot in the summer. I'm still so pleased that it's doing as well as it has, but I usually have good luck with plants...

Now What?

Alright, so I have finalized three novels this winter (to me, "finalizing" is different from "finished" -- I finished those books before this winter, but they weren't "finalized" -- that is, buffed and polished and publisher-ready to my satisfaction -- make sense?), and, for the moment, I'm unsure which piece to work on, next. I have three strong contenders in mind at the moment, but can't really decide which to finalize, next. Eeenie, meenie....

I'm still amazed how quickly the snow has melted; we got so much snow in the Blizzard of '11 (and snow on top of THAT snow), but a warm spell kicks in and it's gone. Amazing. But it's still way too early to put on the shorts -- I really don't rule out snow in Chicago until June.

My Turbotax program arrived yesterday. Good times, that. I'll probably work on that tonight, since Exene'll have the boys, and I'll be able to work on that undisturbed. This year's will be complicated, given that 2010 was THE year Exene and I split (that is, when she finally got a job). 2010 would be the Year of Gnashing Teeth for me. Lordy. So, one last gnash of the teeth as I hash out the tax stuff, then wash my hands of it.

B1 had to do a "blue paper" -- basically, a paper about something that made him sad. He wrote about the loss of Newt, which was really his first experience with death (since Jinx died when he was maybe four, I don't think that quite stuck with him -- plus, Jinx was a mean cat, versus Newt, who was always sweet-natured). Anyway, he wrote about it in his fashion, and drew a sketch of Newt from an old photograph of him (a friend shot a great portrait of Newt back in '92, which I still have). It was bittersweet to see him revisit this sense of loss. He said he likes cats, would get one someday. That's kind of sweet to me, too -- I think B1 is more of a cat person, and B2 is definitely a dog person (B2 keeps nagging for me to get a bulldog; he loves bulldogs [tee hee, so do I]). But it's funny to see B1 express his aesthetic.

Speaking of aesthetics, B2 wanted to watch "Wall-E" yesterday, and he noticed a parallel between the Axiom tech in that movie and the stuff in "Portal" -- and it's very true: the red eyes, the stark white with black highlights -- B2 kept saying "It's like PORTAL, Daddy." Hahah! B2 is very aesthetically attuned. He's definitely going to be the performer and the creative type -- he's got such a strong sense of theatricality and imagination. He'll set up these Lego dioramas and will play meticulously with them, setting up scenes with them with such care. It's charming to watch that young imagination at play.

I have nine screenplay ideas I need to develop. I perennially wrestle with screenplays -- while I do write in a cinematic style, that doesn't lend itself to a ready comfort with screenplay-writing. But the ideas I have simply would work better as screenplays than as books or short stories; they just would. So, I'm trying to do honor to the work by presenting it in the format that would work best with it. Seven Horror, one Thriller, and one SF love story.

Caught with one's pants down

Oh, man. Something funny happened this evening. I swapped the day with Exene, because she was going to be super-late with work, so I took the boys tonight. Anyway, I was minding the boys, wearing my TAB cola t-shirt and some boxer shorts, when there was a knock on the door, and the boys started raising a ruckus, and I thought it was going to be Exene with some unexpected issue, but it turned out to be a candidate for Ward Alderman and one of his supporters, doing a door-to-door thing with prospective voters!

So, I'm standing there in my doorway, in my boxers, talking about education reform with a would-be alderman. He was asking me what issues mattered to me, and I pointed out how the TIF system was a wreck and needed to be fixed, and so he shpieled on that a bit. Then one of my neighbors came home from work, down the hall, and saw me talking to these guys. I felt like saying "Hey, we're talking about education reform! Just leave your pants and join in the debate!" When they left, the supporter said "Btw, love the t-shirt." Bahah!

I'm happy to report that I can smoothly debate city politics with complete strangers while in my boxers.

Final Solution

I haven't listened to Pere Ubu in awhile. I always loved this one...

The Call of the Mild

A visual representation of the dichotomy between the romantic's conception of love, and the realist's, below...

The Romantic.

The Realist.

Heart-Shaped Box

My creation of valentines for the boys for school went well; B1's classmates loved them, and B2 talked about the "millions" of valentines he got (really, more like a couple of dozen, but for him, everything good is in the millions).

Valentine's Day has come and gone. No doubt the cards are sold, the candies bought. I cashed a check at the bank and the teller asked me "Oooh, something for Valentine's Day?" and I scoffed: "Yeah, right."

I figure I won't blather about love for the rest of the month; leading up to Valentine's Day is more than enough. Suffice to say that romantics understand love; realists and pragmatists never truly will -- it's like trying to compare wildlife with livestock, and finding equivalency -- romantics love wildlife; realists love livestock. Romantics get the wild nature of love; realists run from it, are haunted and frightened by it. Realists try to tame and train love, to harness its power and put it to work for them, which might reap dividends for them at some point, but at the cost of passion and other pleasures of true romance. Romantics never presume to try to tame love, but let it roam freely through their worlds. Which is well and good, except when love upends their worlds, or when it breaks their hearts. But true romantics accept that as a price to be paid for knowing the full joys and agonies of love -- to feel deeply is to feel both pain and pleasure keenly; it is integral to the artistic temperament. The pain can be staggering, but the pleasures of it can be no less intense, if truly felt. To the realist, the logic is apparent: why go through all of that trouble, why travel through the wilderness when there's a perfectly good, paved road right there? Avoid pain and uncertainty, reap rewards, turn the heart into a metronome, counting out the beats until inevitable death. To them, "the road less traveled" is less-traveled for a reason. I understand why a realist might do that; it's their choice, and it may, in fact, be a logical and even rational choice -- not terribly exciting or interesting, but it's safe, if unimaginative. I'm just not a realist, myself. If I were a realist, I wouldn't be a very good writer, though, now would I?

Anyway, onward and upward. Spring is teasing its way into the weather, here. I refuse to accept Spring in Chicago until, I dunno, May. ;)

Truly, we get warm spells sometimes like this, and then when you think it's time to pack away the Winter gear, a freak storm comes in and wallops you. So, I'm not holding my breath over this warm trend of the moment.