Category Archives: Discussion and Philosophy

Words and Character

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It seems as though people are judging others more and more by their political positions—their stand on particular issues or even specific bits of legislation. While this is certainly one point of reference, it might be more useful to look at how they treat others, both in person and in writing.
What initially got me thinking about this was an article in The Atlantic (December 2017) tracing the personal history of a major neo-Nazi. The article included a discussion of what this man was like in high school. Some of it is perhaps not surprising—problems with drugs and destructive (and self-destructive) behavior. The surprising part was that his political positions seem to have been quite different.

“He often wore a hoodie with a large F[***] RACISM patch on the back…. [He] set up his own website, for a fake record label… that he used to dupe bands into sending him demo tapes. Here, his leftist leanings were on full display: He wrote posts encouraging people to send the Westboro Baptist Church death threats from untraceable accounts, and he mocked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations.” (p.59)

The article doesn’t say whether he did anything of a productive nature toward reducing racism and homophobia—I’m inclined to doubt it. It sounds like his way of responding was to hurl threats at and mock the opposition.What interested me was that while his targets have flipped 180 degrees since high school, his way of treating them remains unpleasantly the same.
It seems to me that there has been an increase in the amount of public name-calling and general nastiness all around. One of the things we’re taught as we grow up is not to blurt out everything we think. Words can hurt. Treating others with respect requires that we consider the effect of our words before we speak.
Of course, there are some people who just don’t care whether they hurt others, and some people who positively enjoy upsetting people and making them angry (or frightened.)  That says enough about their character right there. The neo-Nazi in the article seems to be one of those.
But I would hope there hasn’t been a sudden increase in the number of people like that. I’m hoping that what is happening is that people are getting careless, writing messages and posts and comments and so forth while in the grip of white-hot rage, and sending them off into the world without taking a moment to calm down,  reread what they’ve written, and consider the likely effect of their words. Calling names will not change anyone’s mind. It can, however, lose you a lot of sympathy.
Could that be what’s happening? I started writing this, thinking that people can change their views on issues and even sometimes their prejudices (in both directions, apparently), but that maybe how they treat other people doesn’t change very much.  It would be interesting to find some data on this. But now I’m hoping that people can change how careful they are with words. Hopefully for the better.
Till next post.

Sewing, Knitting, and (Un)happiness

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This week I’ve been sewing myself a pair of pants. Loose-fitting, double-pleated pants in emerald green, feather-weight corduroy.

It is a fact about sewing (and pretty much any other craft) that I cannot complete a project without mishap. I only use one pattern for pants, but I always seem to be making some minor change—trying to deal with their distressing tendency to split in the seat, or else fiddling with the waistline yet again to keep it current with my own.
Even when I don’t run into trouble with the changes I’m making, there’s usually a piece that gets sewn wrong-side out, or a seam that extends where it should not. Or something completely different—this time I spent over half an hour searching for my seam ripper, which eventually turned up under a sofa cushion. It’s frustrating.
So why am I sewing pants instead of buying them? Granted, stores don’t carry pants that meet all my criteria. (Double-pleats, loose-fitting, not too tight at the waist but not too loose in the seat, soft fabric, useful pockets…) Still, I could probably pay a sewing pro to stitch up a pair to my specifications. I could even get them to finish the seams properly, which I haven’t done for this pair.
Maybe it’s the same as my reason for trying to make French bread. It’s the challenge of the thing.
That’s probably part of it, but I don’t think the situation is quite parallel. At any rate, while thinking about this, two other things kept coming to mind. The first is a comment that my husband made. It echoes something in a book by Stephanie Pearl McPhee, the Yarn Harlot. If I could remember which book, I would quote it, since she puts things so wonderfully. But I can’t, so I’ll have to approximate.
Knitting projects, like sewing projects, often go awry. Knitters end up ripping out mistakes and having to re-knit chunks of their project. Other times, they discover that the size small sweater has somehow turned out to be a giant’s size small. And so forth. Unless the knitter is restrained and keeps her frustrations to herself, at some point her spouse may inquire, “Do you really enjoy knitting?”
It’s a reasonable question, given the amount of grumbling.
And the answer is, “Yes, I really do enjoy knitting.” Even if this blasted hat won’t go around my head…. Grumble grumble.
It’s easy to see how sewing projects and knitting projects are connected. Less clear is why I kept thinking of a section from a book I had recently looked at, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, by Daniel M. Haybron. The part that struck me actually comes right near the beginning of the book. First, the author comments on an experience that led him to the topic of the book. He used to spend summers on a small fishing island as a child, and remembers it as being a very different world, a good place to be, “the only place I’ve ever felt like a fully developed human being.” Later, he compares two hypothetical societies, A and B, and describes them like this:
“Consider then, two communities, A and B. A typical member of A, on a typical day, is in more or less the following condition: at ease, untroubled, slow to anger, quick to laugh, fulfilled, in an expansive and self-assured mood, curious and attentive, alert and in good spirits, and fully at home in her body, with a relaxed, confident posture. A denizen of B, by contrast, is liable to be: stressed, anxious, tense, irritable, worried, weary, distracted and self-absorbed, uneasy, awkward and insecure, spiritually deflated, pinched and compressed. The differences, let us suppose, owe mainly to difference in the prevailing ways of life in these communities.”
A bit later he says,
“Notice that the descriptions of A and B made no explicit reference to happiness or unhappiness. But it should be reasonably apparent that, nonetheless, happiness is precisely what they were about: what A has in its favor is that its residents tend to be happy, whereas the people of B tend not to be.”
What has this got to do with my experience sewing pants? I’ve just said that sewing includes a significant amount of time spent fussily trying to adjust the pattern and then discovering that I’ve messed up and must rip out some seams, all of which tends to produce frustration and anger. The author’s description of society A involves people feeling good in various ways, while it is society B that is described as habitually tense and frustrated.
But then I thought about the origin of his example—the island community that he described and the hard work of its inhabitants—and the fact that they undoubtedly had moments of similar frustration in making things work, but also presumably moments of great satisfaction with their work and its results. I thought about the fact that I genuinely do enjoy sewing, and what that means, and I’ve come up with two possible connections:
1.  Enjoyable activities don’t always look enjoyable.
2.  “Difficult” doesn’t equal “not happy-making.”
I’m stuck for a conclusion here. It seems trite to conclude simply that worthwhile activities involve some work, some parts that aren’t fun—but isn’t that what I’m saying? Or is there something more?
Maybe if I reread the book, which I don’t remember very well, I’ll have more to say. Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice new pair of pants.
Even if they do make me look nine weeks early for St Patrick’s Day.

green corduroy pants with two pleats sewn at home
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Till next post.

Everyone Should Have a Party Trick

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In The Breakfast Club, Molly Ringwald’s character, Claire, is asked what she can do. All the other kids in detention have started making claims about what they can do—one says she can write with her feet, another that he can make spaghetti. Claire says she can’t do anything, and someone replies that everybody can do something. So she reluctantly—but still with some pride—demonstrates her ability to apply lipstick (messily) without using her hands.
We should all have some sort of trick that we can show off on such occasions. Some people have actual magic tricks—you may have run into someone who can pull a quarter from your ear, then make the coin disappear and reappear again elsewhere.  That’s impressive. It’s especially good for astounding visiting children.
Other people can casually take up three clementines and start juggling them. I’ve noticed that people are impressed by even a very limited ability to juggle (unless they themselves can juggle, of course.) Juggling is also contagious—once someone juggles something, everyone starts trying to juggle. This can be dangerous if the objects used are breakable or messy, but clementines are pretty sturdy.
There are people who can square off discarded candy wrappers and fold them into beautiful cranes. Instead of a piece of trash, you have a decoration. Part of what makes it special, though, is watching the transformation.
Being able to play an instrument can be a party trick when the instrument is there in your pocket. My father-in-law is known for pulling out his harmonica on any occasion and playing a suitable tune.
Not all party tricks require props. My husband can pretend to inflate his hand. He blows “into” the thumb, the hand slowly opens up, he pinches the thumb “closed”—then he lets go and his hand goes hissing and spinning crazily about as it “deflates”. I’ve seen it many times and I’m still amused.
Reciting a poem is, or should be, a party trick as well. I think the most effective poems for this purpose are those that tell a story, such as “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, or “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. So I recommend memorizing one long poem to have on hand when you need it. I started memorizing “The Raven,” but didn’t get beyond the first couple of stanzas. I also only know about half of “The Singsong of Old Man Kangaroo” by Rudyard Kipling (perhaps not technically a poem, but it recites like one.) I still remember parts of “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” by Ogden Nash, which I had to memorize in sixth grade.
What brought all this to mind was my daughter’s showing me a hexahexaflexagon that a friend of hers had made. She was trying to remember how to fold one from a strip of paper. The first problem was how to get a series of equilateral triangles—she was sure there was a trick to it, and she was right. When she consulted her friend, she found out that she needed to fold the paper strip at an angle, trying to match edges in the same sort of way one folds a letter into thirds.
Having learned all this, she pointed me to a good (and entertaining) Youtube video. (I had been vainly trying to fold an equilateral triangle.) I was able to make my own hexahexaflexagon, and it occurred to me that this is a good party trick of the sort I mentioned earlier. It’s a bit like making a paper crane, but instead of leaving your audience (victim?) with a decorative sculpture, you leaving them madly flexing a hexagon, trying to find all the sides and looking baffled when a new one pops up after they thought they had found them all.
Hexahexaflexagons, one made of shiny wrapping paper
Hexahexaflexagons, one made from wrapping paper.
So there’s my early New Year’s recommendation—figure out what your party trick is, and if necessary, refresh your memory of it. Clearly I need to do so, since my cranes have been coming out deformed, my poems incomplete, and after a year of “frozen shoulder”, I’m out of practice at even the most limited juggling. Maybe I should get into hexahexaflexagons instead…
strip of paper folded ready for making a hexahexaflexagon
Hexahexaflexagon in process
Till next post.
P.S. The same friend who showed her the hexahexaflexagon also gave her a photocopy of a chapter from a book detailing the history of hexaflexagons and some of their properties. The most important bits are also revealed in the Youtube video series of hexaflexagons by Vihart, esp. “Hexaflexagons 2” which I HIGHLY recommend to anyone who wants to create one, and even those who don’t.