The Test 111: This Is Your "Go To" Test

This week on our podcast The Test, Cunningham investigates how Stacey and I exude so much charm and charisma, and we reveal our "go to" moves to avoid socially awkward situations . . . and we imagine what it would be like if I had cancer of the eyes.

Book Review and Team Name Suggestion All Wrapped Up in One Sentence

Florida, Lauren Groff's collection of geographically related short stories, plunges you into the all the dangers the state has to offer: hurricanes and sinkholes and floods; camping gone bad, rural abandonment, homelessness; then there are the creepy-crawlies: panthers, bugs, gators, and loads and loads of snakes-- coral snakes and moccasins and black snakes, the book is literally crawling with snakes-- the time-periods and narrators are various and the writing is surreal and vivid and it's a crying shame that there is no minor league baseball team in the Sunshine State named The Florida Sinkholes (I especially like the Sarasota Sinkholes).

What?

We drove home from Cape Cod today and we are (ironically) enjoying the cool weather, low humidity, and much lighter traffic here in Jersey.

Serena Wins, Mesomorphs Rejoice

There's a tennis court on the premises where we are staying on the Cape, and I've been playing a lot of tennis with my kids-- several times a day; my knee hurts, my right shoulder hurts, my back hurts, and the only proper analgesic when you're on vacation is beer . . . but after watching both Venus and Serena play this morning, I was inspired and ready to get back out there; I was especially motivated by Serena because-- now that she's had a kid-- she's got nearly the same build as me: she's my height, she's got the Kirby Puckett core, and she's got short arms, unlike her sister Venus, who is long and rangy (my older son is built like me and hits the ball with the same compact stroke, my younger son is skinny and lanky and hits a two-handed backhand with a languid limber stroke that makes both Alex and I very jealous) but then I watch Serena and realize you don't need a long and tall build to play tennis-- her short powerful stroke absolutely murders the ball, and I've been modelling my serve off of her form-- no hitches, very few moving parts, chopper grip, bring it back slow and get into position and then hammer through the ball and when Ian and I went out this afternoon to whack it around after Serena's victory over the slender and lithe Kristina Mladenovic, I hit a couple serves in her honor and I'm proud to say I drilled them, even my son Ian was impressed . . . so thanks Serena, because we can't all look like Ivan Lendl and Maria Sharapova.

Smart Phone, Smart Kids, Slow Dad

I'm not sure if this is a generational thing or if my son Alex is impulsive and rude, but whenever I'm screwing something up with my phone, he grabs it from me and fixes it instead of using his words and communicating to me how I can fix it myself.

We Try To Be an Out-To-Breakfast Family

Perhaps because of the enormous vacuum in my life due to lack of World Cup games until Friday, or perhaps because we like to humor mom once a year . . . whatever the reason, we decided to go out to breakfast this morning-- and we are not an out-to-breakfast-family . . . you know this kind of family, jovial, chubby and good-natured, drinking orange juice while waiting for their pancakes kind of people . . . every once in a while Catherine decides we should be that family and go out to breakfast and it never works out-- this morning Ian and I played tennis and it was hot and he took a game from me again (it's getting frustrating) and then we jumped in the pool and then we decided to bike to the Hangar B Eatery, a critically acclaimed hipster breakfast joint located at the Chatham Airport-- we started biking at 9:30 AM, made out way down the Chatham Rail Trail spur and get to the place at 10 AM and it was small and packed-- we thought everyone would be at the parade but that was not the case-- and we were hungry . . . which is one of the reasons we're not an out-to-breakfast family, as the boys and I get really hangry, but we decided to endure the 35-minute wait and we killed some time listening to a pilot tell us about the biplane and the biplane tours (apparently, this biplane is built from the 1930 specs-- though some of the materials are modernized-- but it's still impressive that some guys in 1930 designed something as complicated as an airplane that well) and we saw a helicopter take off and then we were seated and I think they lost our ticket or got slammed or something because it took a good forty minutes for us to get our food and it was hot inside-- they did give us a free donut and apologized-- but we didn't get our food until after 11 AM and I was really proud of myself and the boys, no one complained and we all endured the wait stoically, despite our hangry status . . . and I thought the food-- when it finally came-- was quite good, but Catherine didn't love her meal and I doubt she'll try to get us to go out to breakfast for a long time.

Check Your Head

Many years ago, I recognized that adult snowboarders were all wearing helmets and so I bought a helmet-- I'm not sure why adult snowboarders didn't wear helmets before this tipping point, but once I saw other people wearing them, it made sense to make the switch; now I'm seeing adult recreational cyclists wearing helmets-- not mountain bikers or serious road bikers, but just regular folks going for a leisurely ride on the rail trail (my wife is included in this group, she says she wants to set a good example for our children) but I am not succumbing to this fad . . . my brain just isn't that valuable.

Random Vacation Notes, Cape Cod 2018 Edition

We've only been up at the Cape since Saturday, but I've already got quite a few thoughts:

1) after an early morning bike ride on Sunday, I walked into the wrong unit-- we're number 28 but I entered number 29 (despite the fact that they have a totally different entrance and door) but I beat a hasty and undetected retreat when I noticed the sneakers in the foyer were the wrong colors . . . this made me remember an incident we witnessed on Saturday morning, we were stuck in standstill traffic just before the mess of an intersection that leads to the Bourne Bridge and a car stopped on the other side of the road and beeped and a guy-- correction, a dude . . . this was definitely a twenty-something bearded sloppy dude-- this dude ran out of the ramshackle house just to the right of our car and darted through the traffic and got into the car on the other side of the road-- he was catching a ride, either from a friend or Uber, and the traffic around his house was severe, and so he ran out of the house so quickly that he didn't notice that the front door caught on the rug and bounced wide open . . . so we were laughing at the fact that the guy didn't notice he left his door wide open and drove away into the traffic and then the plot thickened; another dude wandered out of the wide-open door-- and this dude was definitely not in the same room as the other dude (this house looked like some kind of filthy crash pad) and this second dude was really offended by the wide open front door, he was like: what? who just dared to open our door? I will fuck up whoever opened this door! and he was looking all around for the perpetrator but couldn't find anyone and then he slammed the door shut and it caught on the rug and popped open again and he had this great look of epiphany on his face, and then the traffic started moving and we dove off, properly entertained despite the jam;

2) though in the old days we were stuck drinking Golden Anniversary Light, Massachusetts now has a bewildering array of craft beers and so I used my phone in the beer store and decided on Night Shift Brewing Whirlpool American Pale Ale and it's delicious;

3) The Great Island Trail is a real winner at dead low tide: after a quick walk through the woods and over the dunes, it's all sandbars and tidal pools, and the water is the perfect temperature-- a mix of the Atlantic and Cape Cod Bay . . . you can see Provincetown to the north; we spent three hours out there, my kids netting sea life and watching hermit crabs fight over a snail, and I brought back some nice rocks for my yard;

4) if you're 48  years old and you eat donuts for breakfast, and fried fish, raw oysters, and onion rings from Arnold's for lunch, then your stomach is going to hurt (but, on the bright side, Alex ate a couple of raw oysters and loved them)

5) I have officially gotten my money's worth out of my Sevylor Samoa Inflatable Paddleboard . . . I paddled it up the Oyster River this morning and it still works-- I'm not sure when I bought it but I found a post about it from 2011;

6) the fact that it's unbearably hot in New Jersey this week makes me appreciate the weather here that much more-- it's been in the high 70s-- and the Cape Cod weather-people keep warning folks of the humidity, but I'm like: what humidity?

The Challenge of the Changeling

I don't read much challenging non-fiction these days-- back in my twenties, I remember tackling Gravity's Rainbow (with a reader's guide) and reading Joyce's Ulysses and the Odyssey simultaneously, in hopes of unlocking the symbolism, and stumbling through the gargantuan meta-fictional works of John Barth-- but these days, I generally read challenging non-fiction, which means the substance is more difficult to comprehend than the style . . . a recent exception is The Changeling, by Joy Williams; the book was out of print for a long time, probably because of it's perverse, stylistic insanity, but after 40 years, it has been reprinted and if you're looking for something strange and surreal and unpredictable, with sentences that will stun you into hypnotic submission, give this book a try . . . you will certainly start to think that, "No one who has private thoughts going on in his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard" and you will think these thoughts and so will the children, and the children from Lord of the Flies will pale and wither in the shadows of these half-human juvenile/half-mythical beasts, that slowly start to subsume the fallen adults on their island, only Pearl, the naive dipsomaniac, straddles the adult world and "the secret society of childhood from which banishment was the beginning of death" and she does it partly by being oblivious and partly by being numbingly drunk, which turns out to be the only way to survive this cryptic, corrupt journey.

First World Problem # 745

We were on the road this morning before 5 AM (4:54 AM to be precise) but we still hit standstill traffic at the Bourne Bridge.

Open Sesame, Mind

Two podcasts that opened my mind and altered my thoughts on political issues:

1) The Daily: Justice Kennedy's Last Decison . . . I assumed that the 5-4 vote in Janus vs. Federation of State, a case years in the making by conservative lobbying groups and their wealthy donors, we a real blow to workers-- as now people who enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining by their union do not necessarily have to pay the fees associated with these costs-- if you don't join the union, you don't have to pay anything to them, even if they are doing services for you-- but maybe not being able to automatically collect dues will end some union complacency and make the unions cater to what the workers want-- or else there will be "wildcat" strikes (such a great term, teachers bucked the union in West Virginia and went on a wildcat strike) so perhaps greater transparency in union fees and membership will galvanize supporters and lead to a better deal for workers;

2) This American Life: It's My Party and I'll Try If I Want To . . . I used to think single payer healthcare-- Medicare for All-- was impractical and impossible, a figment of Bernie Sanders' imagination, and that no real politicians were considering this . . . but I might be a victim of a political system captured by wealthy donors and their benefactors; this podcast tells the story of Jeff Beals, a progressive Democrat trying to win New York's congressional district 19; Beals has visions of trying to fix a rigged economy and truly believes that Medicare for All is an achievable goal . . . but the wealthy donors would rather he talk about LGBT rights and gun control and abortion and stay away from the economy . . . the donors who control who runs and how much money they get tend to be moderate and pro-business, and this is causing a rift in the Democratic Party . . . you can't change won't you don't discuss and that very well might be why Clinton, who outspent Trump, lost to him-- instead of making speeches to Goldman, she should have addressed the elephant in the room.

Dramaturgy How To, Ready Break!

The film Ladybird is sweet and touching and funny and true (and apparently quite emotional if you're a woman and you were mean to your mom when you were a teenager) but the thing I'll take away from the film is this scene, which is exactly how I will teach blocking in Shakespeare class for the rest of my career.

It's Already 6 PM? Yikes! How Did That Happen? What Are We Going to Do About Dinner?

Most educated people are dimly aware that time is relative-- clocks run slower when gravity is stronger and movement, confounded by the speed of light, makes time go faster as objects diminish in size-- but these ideas are generally categorized as impractical abstractions, necessary to our understanding of the medium-sized Newtonian physical world which we inhabit; however, James Holt brings up a more mundane example in his essay "Time-- the Grand Illusion?" (which is included in the entertaining and excellent essay collection When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought) when he points out that research indicates that people in their twenties, when asked to estimate three minutes of time, are quite accurate, but people in their sixties, when asked to do the same task, miss the the mark by an average of forty seconds-- their internal clocks are running relatively slower in comparison to the young folks-- and so three minutes and forty seconds feels like three minutes of clock time . . . the older you get, the more prevalent this phenomenon is, which is why really old people drive so slowly-- anything over 22 MPH and they're in a subjective Indy 500-- and it's why when you are young, a summer can feel like eternity . . . Holt makes the (rather depressing) claim that by the age of eight, "one has subjectively lived two-thirds of one's life" and so that whole "I'm 48 years young" euphemism is complete bullshit . . . I'm 48 years old and that's incredibly old, in the scope of my subjective life, and even though it is summer, time is hurtling by for me, while my kids are experiencing each day in a more accurate sense-- they are 13 and 14-- and in a much less epic sense than when they were 6 and 7 . . . but, of course, there is no accurate sense-- everyone's time is relative to their age and metabolism and internal clock, so Einstein's theories aren't so far out and abstract, after all.

My Modules Think, Therefore My Modules Are (Some Sort of Non-reductionist Emergent System)

Michael S, Gazzaniga is one of our most celebrated neuroscientists and his new book certainly demonstrates this; The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind tackles the hardest problem in the universe: where are all these thoughts coming from? do they exist? are they a product of my neurons or are my neurons influenced by my thoughts? is there a spook in the machine? is there a machine at all? and on and on and on . . . Gazzaniga first gives a quick history of the evolution of thought on consciousness, from Descartes to William James to Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, and then gets you up to date with the modular, non-dualist, non-reductionist ideas that are floating around now . . . his ideas about modularity remind me of the seminal AI book Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky-- this is a book you should read-- and his use of brain-damaged patients as case studies to explain the pervasive modularity of consciousness remind me of one of the best books I have ever read-- Phantoms of the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran-- but Gazzaniga tackles bigger fish than these books, he works through protocols all the way down to quantum physics, and notes that the brain is not a machine, the human brain is something that allowed us to build machines, and then we made a metaphor between machines (and computers) and brains, but they are not all that similar-- the machine is built, while the brain evolved, many modules in concert, and the brain builds itself, with RNA and DNA and phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes -- with operations all the way down to the quantum level, immeasurable without subjectivity (because what tool could you use to measure atomic particles, except a measurement device made of atomic particles, which influences the very particles it is trying to measure) and so there is a metaphysical inspirational epiphany at the end of the book . . . we don't have to worry about strong AI because computers are in no way like our brains, in the same way that inert matter is nothing like life, because life evolved at the atomic level-- binary ones and zeroes will never approximate this-- and consciousness is an emergent property of an immensely complex modular system, symbols bubbling up and influencing other symbols, and this is reflected on so many physical levels that it boggles our capacity to think . . . luckily, Gazzaniga writes clearly enough about these topics and he intersperses entertaining moments throughout, my favorite is a cameo from Neil Young, who perfectly describes the unique subjectivity of personal consciousness and the desire to recapture personal experience; Young says, "I still try to be that way but, you know, I am not twenty-one or twenty-two . . . I am not sure that I could re-create that feeling, it has to do with how old I was, what was happening in the world, what I had just done, what I wanted to do next, who I was living with, who my friends were, what the weather was."

That Dog Thinks It's a Car!

Our new dog is learning to run alongside me while I bike (she's attached to the bike by a bungie cord) and while she trots along at a pretty good clip, I think the dog I saw today from my car window would be an even better biking partner: this dog had no back legs and instead of them, she had a cart with two wheels which the rear portion of her body rested upon . . . so if she were attached to the bike, she could just pull up her front legs and basically become a sidecar.

The Test 110: Abracadabra (This Test Will Reach Out and Grab Ya)

The Test is back and better than ever (or maybe exactly the same as ever) and for the start of this new season, I take one for the team, throw away all artistic sensibility, and administer a quiz on something the ladies love-- something silly, absurd and cheesy . . . that's right, we're talking magic; I'll admit that in the end, I enjoyed learning a bit about this subject, and while I don't believe in magic (like Cuningham) nor do I care all that much that people can learn to do tricks (which inspires Stacey) I do enjoy giving the ladies some "bonus lectures" on what magic is all about, so give this one a listen before it disappears.

Imagine How Tired I Would Be If I Actually Played

I'm too exhausted from the Germany/Sweden game to write anything decent.

Dave Gets It (Slowly But Surely)

When I first got my Father's Day T-Shirt, I was confused-- Tantalum? Cobalt? What?-- but then I noticed that the abbreviations-- "Ta" and "Co"-- spelled out the word "TaCo," and I love tacos, so that made perfect sense . . . and then the day after Father's Day, I held up my Father's Day T-Shirt and said, "This reminds me of the credits on Breaking Bad," and my wife and kids looked at me like "Duh" and I said, "And I love Breaking Bad . . . this is a great t-shirt!"

Once More unto the Breach, Teach

Teaching is a weird job-- sometimes it feels like it's all introductions and conclusions-- and when the year ends and you wave good-bye to the seniors, you're not thinking about the fact that you're going to do it all over again next year . . . but you are (we were especially cognizant of this today because after sending the seniors off to graduation, we went out in New Brunswick to watch the demise of Messi and we saw some students that graduated last year wandering up Easton and they seemed so old, so far removed, though they were only a year out) and the only memories that might differentiate this year from all the others are the annual hand-drawn mural of all the department happenings and a fantastic picture of your doppelgänger for a day.

Thinking It vs. Communicating It

I'd like to thank my dedicated readers for pointing out yesterday's gaffe; I thought the word "tone" to myself while writing yesterday's sentence, but I didn't actually type the word "tone" and instead wrote this objectless phrase: "the anthemic and triumphant of a Bruce Springsteen song," and while there's no excuse for not proofreading, I think I actually re-read this sentence and imagined that the word was there . . . I also have this trouble when I speak to my wife-- I think a bunch of thoughts and I think that I said some of the thoughts as a preface to my actual spoken statement, but really I uttered some cryptic, out-of-context gibberish.