span-tastic: why i write longer blog entries

The prevalence of attention deficit disorder has rapidly increased over the past two decades. Estimates for the number of school-age kids suffering from the disorder range from 3% up to 24%. The American Deficit Disorder Association reports that one-half to two-thirds of all children who are afflicted with ADD or ADHD will continue to struggle with attention issues as adults.

Behaviors typical of the disorder are hyperactivity, impulsivity, and distractibility. Though there are biological and hereditary factors that appear to cause the disorder, I have to wonder if society doesn't feed into the problem of short attention spans. At the very least, we tolerate it.

I don't need to point to things like the common habit of changing television channels or the ever-upgrading technology or the need to replace perfectly good items with the 'new'. Having worked as a teacher, I have witnessed the lack of lengthy attention spans in most kids. First of all, kids are obsessed with checking their phones. I wish there were a better word than obsessed because the need is stronger. Perhaps possessed, as in they almost have no control over this need. And the need consumes them. They absolutely have to know who just texted them, who wrote what on Facebook, or where their friends are planning to meet up after school... even if it is only 8:15 in the morning. Despite our best efforts as teachers to prevent cell phone usage in class, it happens. Depending on the particular room you teach in and the organization of desks, etc., it can be quite difficult to monitor all of the kids all of the time. Impossible, in fact. Even if you require the students to leave their bags in a corner of the room, taking with them only what is necessary for your class, phones can still be hidden in pant pockets or under over-sized sweatshirts. This all falls under the category of distractibility. And I believe that we, as teachers, feed into this problem. Schools of education teach future teachers the necessity of "chunking" up their lesson plans into 4 or 5 shorter lesson plans, each only spanning 10-15 minutes. While this certainly works better for maintaining the attention of all students, it seems to just reinforce shorter attention spans. When I was in high school, I remember having to sit through entire English classes where the parallels between Telemachus and Odysseus were discussed and analyzed, where discussion was only interspersed with returning to the epic to read aloud, where absolutely nothing was ever written on the board (and so we were forced to pay attention so we could take notes.) I am not saying that this is the answer, but I do think it helped me to develop a longer attention span.

Impulsivity. This is something darker and more frightening about the way our society turns a sort of blind eye to this problem in teens. It has become fairly well-known that teens do not have a fully developed prefrontal cortex and thus are possess weaker impulse control. Simultaneously, their logical reasoning and other intellectual abilities attain mature adult levels much earlier. They may feel adult, but they can't act like it. The reason I said that their impulsiveness scares me a bit is because of the increase in risky behaviors in which kids are participating. Perhaps this is because parents aren't around as much; perhaps because our entire society has become much more informal. Who knows? What I do know is the urgency to be present and visible online -- in not very healthy ways -- is another obsession for teens. For her blog article, "10 things you don't know about teens and social networking," Sarah Weir interviewed the cast of Facebook Me, a play to be performed at the New York International Fringe Festival. Katie, a 15-year old commented:

"I've become very good at taking pictures of myself. I know what angle is best, I know how to part my lips... you know. It's like the number one thing on my mind is 'I need to get home right now and take a new profile picture.' All because I want someone to comment on how I look."

This need leads to impulsive behavior in order to catch the best profile picture... clearly, as Katie implies, the most provocative one. If you need to always one-up your friends, you may be inclined to act less rationally and more impulsively.

Another problem I notice with attention span in our society is the need to be 'ever-present.' Or maybe a better way to phrase what I mean is 'ever-available.' Another teen that Ms. Weil interviewed explains:

"My friendships are really affected by social networking.  You have to constantly validate your friends online. And everyone's like 'Where were you?' 'What have you been doing?' 'Why haven't you commented on my picture yet?' So you have to be online all the time, just to keep track, so you don't upset anyone." - Jasmine, 13

This is not just a problem for teenagers, though. Adults, too, expect other adults to text right back or return phone calls immediately. And if it doesn't happen right away, a sort of resentment begins to build. Being busy is no excuse anymore. A cell phone is always with you. Why couldn't you answer? Certainly, I am not the first to wonder how healthy all of this is. Whereas purchases and keeping up with the Joneses used to dominate our need for instant gratification, communication and relationships have now also fallen prey.

Despite all of this, I believe otherwise of people. What I mean is that, I believe that people are inherently thoughtful, reflective, and curious, and that they really do want to engage with ideas in a thorough manner. Take the play, Copenhagen, for instance. While there is an old adage in the theater world that "audiences don't do to the theater to think," this is indeed a thinking-man's play in which physicist Werner Heisenberg and his mentor Neils Bohr discuss the uncertainy principle and other complicated topics in nuclear physics. Yet, this play was an incredible success, toppling the notion that people want to turn off their brains while being entertained. Perhaps people even want entertainment to challenge their brains.

This, I believe, whole-heartedly. And, in short (or long), this is why I refuse to write much shorter, 1-2 paragraph blog entries as some of my family (who so want me to be successful at this) have suggested. While they may make this suggestion because they believe it will draw bigger audiences, I believe that people want to engage, want to feel mentally uncomfortable, want to read about ideas and make connections between seemingly unrelated things. I cannot give you the best of who I am as a thinker, a writer, a question poser, if I only have 50 words to do so. This is not to contradict my blog entry on 'being concise,' because I also do not mean to stretch something out to the point where it becomes too flimsy and sheer to hold any weight. It is to confirm that I have faith in people... and I want to be a part of the world that wants to think... and think hard.... and think for extended periods. And then to pause, and later to return again and think some more. If anything, I want to be part of the movement the contends against shorter attention spans. In the end, I think it's worth it. Here's to a lengthy engagement.

national icons: julia vs. martha

You know someone is truly an icon when she can go solely on her first name. Beyonce, Gisele, Marilyn. Such is also the case with both Julia (Child) and Martha (Stewart) -- two dominant, headstrong women who took the reins and used food and cooking to become TV superstars.

I hate to gender stereotype, but it is hard to argue with the fact that there still exist typically male and typically female character traits... at least in our perception. Despite androgynous vampires and Chaz Bono going on Dancing with the Stars, our societal norms are still situated in women as the 'softer' sex and men as the assertive hunters.

Both Julia and Martha possess decidedly masculine characteristics. Both are competitive, insistent, confident to the point of arrogance, and unafraid to give their opinions even when wildly unpopular. Yet, we remember Julia with fondness while Martha is prickly and rubs us the wrong way. And Julia was able to transcend herself to become 'the queen of cuisine' while Martha is forever mired in the quagmire of her own 'Martha-ness'... as 'Cruella de-Stewart' for example.

So what is the difference between these powerful women? Martha may have 2.3 million Twitter followers, but Julia has the entire country affectionately recalling her high-pitched voice and her awkward height and posture. And perhaps that is at the heart of it. Julia was capable of -- even embraced -- being imperfect, while Martha incessantly reiterates an image of the unattainable. Yes, you can try to be like Martha or create the 'perfect' Thanksgiving that she displays in her magazine spreads and on her show, but you can never achieve exactly what Martha does. No one is ever as good as Martha. Julia, on the other hand, was happy to let you see her drop a turkey on the floor and put it back on the plate to serve.

First, let's look at Julia. Julia is the queen of haute cuisine. Her Mastering the Art of French Cooking is frequently referred to as a 'Bible.' She has been parodied on Saturday Night Live by Dan Aykroyd, has appeared in a Nike Commercial, has been the subject of numerous comic strips (The New Yorker, Beetle Bailey, for example), and has been an answer in a New York Times crossword puzzle. She has been on Sesame Street and in a Boston Science Museum exhibit captivating children with an explanation of how DNA and the beginnings of life emerged from a 'primordial soup.' She has appeared in Life magazine, has been on the cover of Time, and has been described as more convincing than Walter Cronkite. She has transcended the realm of cooking to take her place alongside the Statue of Liberty and Florence Nightingale as bearer and protector of national values and culture, as author of history still not yet written. Ironically, Julia's fundamental 'American-ness' is paradoxically built around the emblematic figure of 'The French Chef.' I wrote an article as a graduate student at UC-Santa Barbara considering how this capture and redefinition of what is so essential to France (their particular cuisine and relationship to food) reveals how the project of national identity is situated always, as Stuart Hall explains, in "the gaze of Otherness. And there is no identity that is without the dialogic relationship to the Other. The Other is outside, but also inside the Self, the identity. So identity is a process, identity is split. Identity is not a fixed point but an ambivalent point." (Stuart Hall, "Ethnicity: Identity and Difference," in Geoff Eley & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Becoming National (1996), p. 345) In other words, this 'ambivalent point' of American identity corresponds to a congruent node of ambivalence in French identity -- the resounding chorus is that of two nations involved in a discourse wherein the definition of self circles around the negation and yet the very present-ness of the other. Through the mercurial relationship that exists (and has historically existed) between the United States and France, each nation has developed a critical 'anti-legend.' America is that which is not French and France is most definitely that which is not America -- each anti-legend buoyed most notably by

its unifying force and its allegorical capacities -- since by talking about America it [France] never stopped talking about France. With, however, one considerable difference: the metadiscourses of legitimization are organized around purely positive nodes -- emancipating the citizen, fulfilling the spirit, a classless society, and so on. The "great legends" are dead, outdated by postmodernity's inherent "incredulouness." As for anti-Americanism, it has spread and prospered: a convex "great legend," it remains operational while the metadiscouses of good have lost all their effectiveness, all their powers of coalescence in the social imagination. Which is all the more reason for taking it seriously: this anti-legend... (Phillipe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French Anti-Americanism (2005), pg. 453)

With the death of the 'great legends,' the grand narratives, the 'metadiscourses of good,' the importance of the other in its role as non-self is heightened. In other words, the ambivalence of the self, the very un-fixedness of identity, leaves a gap in our desire for communal mythologizing. Thus, the legend re-emerges at the anti-legend rather than disappearing altogether. Julia Child serves this purpose of re-mythologizing characteristic aspects of American identity -- as self-made, as practical, as down-to-earth and self-effacing. In doing so, she re-situated "the whole topos of egalitarian innocence and happy frugality" (Roger, p.41) around the central characteristic of French cuisine. In Julia Child, a six-foot-two, gangly and slightly awkward woman was "'our lady of the ladle,' gazing benevolently from the cover of Time at her vast American following. She [would become] a reassuring and familiar icon, a national treasure, cherished for her pervasive presence on television." (Noel Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (1997), p. 310) In re-locating the very heart and soul of French culture into this woman, the iconization of Julia Child represents not only the assertion of a national myth, but the consumption of the 'other's' very essence into the self.

In the necessarily ongoing construction of American national identity, Julia Child exemplifies the inability of the nation to exist solely as a place. Instead, it hovers in the ghostly forces, the image-making icons, produced and consumed in the public sphere that defines its future power and past significance through this "sliding movement or flickering between the two," (Pheah Cheng, "Spectral Nationality," Boundary 2 26:3 (1999), p. 247) between the self and the other. Ultimately, the nation takes on a bodily manifestation in order for its legends or anti-legends to take shape (think of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jesse James, Paul Revere, Hiawatha), yet the irony that critical and postcolonial theorist Pheng Cheah suggests is that this body is not the origin of a national spectrality (or intangible) but the recipient, and thus an artificial and 'artifactual' body -- a tool crafted by the national self to capture and encapsulate the abstract national spirit.

I explained, in that same paper, how there is a long tradition between the U.S. and France of antagonistic relations (and cultural self-perceptions) that, ironically, help define each country's national self. The USA's emergence from various European colonial rulers meant that it was colored by this past as a possession of Europe and the Old World. Even before the American Revolution was complete, the threat this new nation and culture posed to the 'Old' was sensed. Thereby, a Franco-American debate evolved which, for the French, was "a crusade against the budding imposture of America worship -- part scientific debate, part image war." (Roger, p. 2) With no nation having yet achieved independence from colonial rule, the idea of a democratic nation emerging from this project was both exciting and threatening. There was a sense in the 1760's and 70's that if the American colonies won their independence "the result would be a crop of small-scale, localized tyrants, and that in the long run a kind of 'rogue state' would emerge, using all kinds of military tactics to take over global trade." (Roger, p. 24) The American nation would have come from something essentially European (as its leaders and founders were European) and thus the threat -- it was an affront to the Old World, dominated at the time by France. The stakes of this dispute were high -- from its ambiguous and interrelated origins, the American nation had gone from a part of Europe into something that rejected it and all its culture, morals, values, even its history. From the beginning, the anti-American attitude assumed by the French was "not solipsistic, but it [was] largely self-referential and autarchic." (Roger, p. xi) The French had to stem the tides of their own America worship. Their initial enthusiasm for using the American republic as a model for their own was quickly realized to be an admission of an intellectual and political inferiority.

The perception of this threat led to a concerted effort to discredit the Americas -- and to do so scientifically for science and rational logic are "proof", of course, and exist as the very backbone of the Enlightenment. Phillipe Roger, in his book The American Enemy, traces these early anti-American sentiments. The proclamation of French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, that the New World produced degenerative cousins of 'authentic' European animals legitimized the inferiority of America through science. With the machine set in motion by Buffon, other 'scientific' evidence of America's shortcomings quickly followed.

Many of the deficiencies of the New World began to bear the mark of inferior gustatory qualities. Cornelius De Pauw claimed that "plant life in America was not so much plant life as plant preserves, a gigantic heap of sauerkraut" (Roger, p. 17) (bearing an obvious denigrating reference to the second-rate cuisine of the nearby incipient German nation.) The main food sources of the Americas -- yuccas and other roots -- derivatives of the species Jucas and Manihot were discovered to be poisonous when eaten raw. The implication was striking: "America was stupefying -- it pretended to nourish its offspring in order to kill them!" (Roger, p. 18) With extreme accounts of French colonists forced to turn to cannibalism during their exploration of America, De Pauw

proved this was a wretched, desolate country where no one could survive, and he hinted at the terrible "revolution" that America provoked in its invaders, who were transformed into cannibals as surely as Circe's visitors had been turned into swine... [This pronouncement] could also be read as an allegory of the fate of colonizing countries: Europeans devouring each other symbolized the draining of their vital energy into the human abyss known as America. (Roger, p. 16)

Soon, this 'science' of inferiority expanded beyond that realm to manifest as proof for why America had produced no men of genius for, as Guillaume Thomas Raynal, the French historian and philosopher concluded, "under this foreign sky, the mind has become as enervated as the body." (Guillaume Thomas Raynal, quoted in Roger, p. 23) Notice the bodily reference. And such began the transfer of pseudo-scientific arguments into the realm of philosophy, morality, and culture, i.e. "an aesthetic anti-Americanism, which would be the primitive base of the cultural anti-Americanism of the twentieth century." (Roger, p. 36) French exiles to America began to describe the nation as all that was anathema to European gentile culture. The Americans were badly mannered, greedy, conversationally inept, and intellectually lacking. These American philistines were only interested in material progress in which, it was conceded, they were rapidly making great economic strides. However, this interest in the utilitarian 'arts' was perceived as detrimental to the development of the 'true' arts. France thus reversed its former idolatry of the "solemn myth... of Washington's America as neo-Roman, agrarian, and virtuous" (Roger, p. 40) and replaced it with a vision of the journey into the American wilderness as neither "a source of replenishment or a rediscovery of humanity's robust childhood... [but] a Conradesque trip into the heart of darkness: one had 'the impression of traveling backward through the progress of the human spirit.'"(Roger, p. 42) It had been the Europeans who had originally 'discovered' America. These scientific studies, and the basis for a burgeoning cultural superiority that they established, enabled French intellectuals to 'rediscover' America through their pens. Through the re-writing of the American narrative as complete degeneration, they once again gave shape to the New World -- a shape informed by the power of knowledge and superior cultural authority. Such were the image wars that began as the United States was just being formed: "just as the New England colonies were solidifying their aspirations for a vita nuova, the most listened-to voices in Europe were consigning America to sterility and death." (Roger, p. 7)

Cuisine is a subject fraught with nuances. It can divide the nation from the inside (think of all the regional varieties of Indian or Italian cooking), yet it can define a national character through a more tenuous putative community. Through its ability to unite people in an 'imagined community' (Anderson, 1983), it aids the nation-state in the smooth administration of governance as "gourmandism is one of the principle bonds in society; it is what gradually expands that spirit of conviviality uniting the various social strata every day, what forms them into a single whole, animates conversation, and smoothes the rough edges of conventional inequality." (Brillat-Savarin, quoted in Jean-Robert Pitte, French Gastonomy (1991), p. 140)

Whereas the African land grab was an imperial fight over physical territory, the rivalry between the United States and France is a struggle over the territory of Culture with a capital C, between the Old World and the New, indeed between the 'cooked' and the 'raw.' Both nations are products of the Enlightenment with its legacy of universalistic totality and its desire to accelerate human 'progress' in which "the linked and complementary goals of universal enlightenment and universal commerce contained no space of opacity." (Paul Rabinow, French Modern (1989), p. 23) France had long assumed control over the spread of Culture -- in fashion, furniture, art, and food. The metamorphosis of Julia Child into a national icon who practically single handedly created a unique American cuisine was a usurping of the right to this position of authorhood in regards to prescribing the realm of the avant-garde and aesthetics internationally, indeed of the right to be the writer of 'history [or History] even before it was written.'

Long before Martha became the measure of the success of our holiday cooking and interior decorating, Julia invaded the home through the medium of television. Home is largely about nostalgia rather than reality... and is most certainly based in memory. The visual mediums of television and film can thereby serve as ways to recover "'lost, unheard memories'... of that past. So identity, it seems is a question of memory, and memories of 'home' in particular." (David Morley & Kevin Robins, "No Place like Heimat: Images of Home(land) in European Culture," in Eley & Suny, p. 461) For many viewers, Julia excavated an American historical cuisine (germinating from the French) dug out of (or into) the metaphorical archaeology of the American home -- in fact, right in its very heart, the kitchen. Her spectrality of the intangible other was thus reconstructed into an exclusively American memory -- a memory located in a place (unlike the placeless nation) and in a space (American public television and its public sphere.)

Raymond Oliver, a television chef in France and the author of Gastronomy of France, would devote an entire chapter of his book to one of the nation's most hallowed and mystical dishes -- bouillabaisse. The great fish soup stood for "the most vibrant and passionate [traits]... a dish which in itself represents a whole region and its deepest motivations and symbols." (Raymond Oliver, The Gastronomy of France (1967), p. 163) Julia spent a long time on a mission to understand this vraie bouillabaisse. Finally, after receiving "conflicting advice as to the true ingredients: one said absolutely no tomatoes, one said saffron, another no saffron... [she] became 'irked' at their [French chefs'] dogmatism and occasional ignorance. 'Balls,' she replied in private." (Fitch, p. 213) The particularities of bouillabaisse -- particularities that, in reality, did not seem to be discernible --

never struck her as sacrosanct. Julia refused to honor that brand of wisdom about bouillabaisse that insisted only traditional, grizzled fishermen knew how to make it properly... She went on to make bouillabaisse everywhere she lived, including Norway, and found she could always achieve "the necessary flavor." What made a dish French wasn't the raw materials, it was what happened to them in the hands of the cook." (Laura Shapiro, "Sacred Cows and Dreamberries: In Search of the Flavor of France," Gastronomica Summer 2005 5-3, p. 57)

In her French Chef show on bouillabaisse, Julia only calls the soup by its French name at the beginning of the show. Thereafter, she refers to it simply as 'fish soup' explaining how "all it is really is a plain fisherman's stew made out of the day's catch of unsaleable leftovers. Unfortunately, when you get a famous recipe like this one, the gourmets get hold of it and they fancy it up so much and say 'do this' or 'do that' or 'that's not the real thing' that us ordinary people feel it's impossible to do... but everyone enjoys eating it and there's nothing very difficult about it." (The French Chef, "Bouillabaisse a la Marsaillaise, WGBH (Boston), PBS, 1963)

French cooking was not eluding Americans because of any mystical quality, but because of a snobbish elitism, Julia concluded. "The idea was to take the bugaboo out of French cooking," (Julia Child, quoted in Fitch, p. 289) Julia would remark of her purpose in authoring Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This 'bugaboo' is exactly what Martha reintroduced into cooking and decorating and even crafting. Achieving decorated Easter eggs of this quality is not simple.

Paper-Napkin Decoupage Eggs

For Julia, the French nation was not hallowed. To her it was a body of knowledge that could be deconstructed and analyzed just like any other large source of information. Thus, Julia took a scientific approach to French cuisine (perhaps an ironic counterpoint to the pseudo-science with which the French once approached the young American nation), an approach aimed at stripping away its esoteric quality... for Julia understood that magic was not in any way related to good cooking. She rigorously tested methods, broke down techniques, and analyzed obscurely written recipes in a process of codifying French cuisine into something objective and attainable. This was Julia Child's earnest pledge: she would "laboriously define the cuisine she had fallen in love with, breaking it down into its smallest components and putting them back together so that for the first time they would make sense to people like herself -- ambitious home cooks from a country French gastronomes viewed with horror and derision." (Shapiro, Gastronomica, p. 54)

In the process, Julia discovered that the failure of Americans to be able to successfully reproduce French dishes was not due to their incompetence, but to differences in ingredients that had never before been revealed. Like a true scientist, Julia discovered there was a gluten difference of 2.5 percent between French and US flours. This difference had been hampering American bakers in their attempts to produce a quality loaf of French bread. And this was certainly not the only difference that had become a cooking problem which had "delayed completion [of a dish]... from the oversized turkeys that had be cooked differently from the French poultry to the difficulty of finding creme fraiche... American veal was not as pale and tender as the French; U.S. butchers offered different meat cuts; except for parsley, few fresh herbs were available; American ate a lot of broccoli, which was rare in France -- and so the discoveries went." (Fitch, p. 240)

French cuisine became Americanized through Julia. It was analyzed and rewritten. The title of her magnum opus is instructive. It is Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- it is mastering, not imitating or admiring, that is meant to transpire. Further, the word cuisine has become cooking -- a word which does not sustain the same mystique, the same myth of a people. In addition, Julia was willing to use modern innovations and appliances as long as they achieved the same results as traditional techniques. Martha, on the other hand, prohibited reference to microwaves until after her release from prison when she was forced to appease a public who had lost faith in her... and on a more personal level, in order to rehabilitate her own image as someone accessible to the everyman.

Julia had the definite purpose of taking 'the bugaboo' out of French cooking and demonstrating that all one needed to do to cook well -- even to achieve the most challenging level of haute cuisine -- was to follow rules. Thereby, she translated French magic into American rationalism. This rational approach to French cuisine was completely new. Mastering set a standard that ensuing cookbooks would follow. None had been so clearly laid out, exemplified by the two-column approach used in Mastering where the ingredients were listed in bold on the left-hand side of the page and the recipes stood to the right. When Julia appeared on television in 1962, this rational approach continued to be her modus operandi, countered, of course, by her 'hamming it up.' Julia's enthusiastic way of analyzing, translating, and teaching was fundamentally appealing to an American public who had been condescended to by others claiming the impossible techniques of French cuisine or assuming that Americans would be challenged by and satisfied with the recipes in The Can-Opener Cookbook (1952). At MIT, there was a group of physicists and engineers who gathered weekly to watch her show. Though their interest was not in cooking per se, they were enthralled by "her technique, her attention to detail and rules. Here was a woman on television who was not sexy and was not selling something; she was demonstrating technique, and they were fascinated." (Fitch, p. 309)

Martha began her career as a model. And this interest in appearances has never stopped. More recently, Martha has allowed a larger staff to prepare and test recipes for her magazines and cookbooks (still often without acknowledgement though...) However, when Martha first began publishing cookbooks on her own, they yielded astonishingly beautiful end results, but failed frequently in flavor and taste. I know this because I became a Martha fan early on, but after my mom and I tried several of her recipes, we concluded the aesthetics didn't make up for the cardboard taste.

Martha in Bazaar magazine

Martha's 'empire' is largely based on show. She is notoriously well-known for being incredibly picky about presentation. One particularly out-of-control Thanksgiving shoot is described in the August 8-15 edition of New York Magazine in an article by Benjamin Wallace titled "The Comeback That Wasn't":

A Thanksgiving story shot at Stewart's stables in Bedford featured a long table and was so complicated that it became almost a comedy of errors. A child's hair caught fire. Stewart sliced her thumb and was sent to the hospital. At the table, Stewart was flanked by Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, and his wife, hardly avatars of the simple life. (By the time the story was published, Marshall was on trial for misappropriating his mother's fortune, and the picture had to be blurred out.) "There was an incredible divide between what Martha was interested in and what the reader wanted," a then-editor says. (Wallace, p. 41)

This is exactly the opposite of Julia. Julia wanted the viewer/reader to be successful. Martha wants to remain above us, always superior, always in utmost control. She screwed one of her most lucrative deals with Kmart because she demanded renewal of a completely imbalanced contract. Before ending that partnership, she angrily expressed in a CNBC interview how disappointed she was with Kmart's "shabby stores and poor quality merchandise." (Mercedes Cardona, "Martha Stewart and Kmart: Putting on Appearances") She bungled other potential deals to diversify the brand away from her with companies like the Knot, Cynthia Rowley, and Jonathan Adler because "Stewart would find something wrong with [all the deals.] In some cases, she'd nix the idea at the last minute, after sitting down with the prospective brand owner. As one former executive put it, 'She didn't want anyone else in the kitchen.'" (Wallace, p. 40) Julia invites us into her kitchen. Martha makes her kitchen a pinnacle of unattainable perfection with her always standing in judgment, always in control. Julia trusted us; Martha trusts no one. Julia cooked and wrote books and went on television not to promote herself or to create a brand, but because she wanted to share knowledge with the American public. She wanted us to enjoy eating, to broaden our gustatory boundaries. She wanted us to experience the power of making a dish that seemed impossible. Martha is all about "Martha". Just look at the following comparison of one of Julia's and one of Martha's book covers.

 

Visually, Martha dominates her book cover while there is only a small photo of Julia in the upper right hand corner of her cover. In terms of the titles themselves, Martha's book is more adamantly "Martha"-focused. It is Martha Stewart's Cooking School... and no one else's!! Julia's book is more inviting. You can open it and cook with Julia. She is not standing above you in judgment, but in the kitchen by your side... as a friend with clear, logical instructions.

Julia had a risque and racy sense of humor. She mocked an assistant producer on Good Morning America for his failed pronunciation of croque-monsieur: "in her loudest voice, she said, 'No it's not cock-monsieur, it's croque-monsieur!'" (Jacques Pepin, "My Friend Julia Child," Gastronomica, p. 13) She swore often and could be heard nonstop making comments such as "Jacques, I have a nice piece of tail for you," (Pepin, p. 12) when Pepin and Julia were showing how to remove lobster meat in one of their shows. She was unafraid to be herself, even when that self was entirely imperfect, full of foibles, and inelegance. But that was what made her endearing. Martha is not endearing. Martha will never reveal to us who she really is... and it is questionable if she even knows any more having wrapped her brand and herself so tightly together. In the end, Julia trusted and invited us to share with her; Martha refused to trust, refuses to give up power, and thus will never reach the legendary status of Julia. Perhaps both Julia and Martha exhibit and embody a particular side of our national identity. As Sarah Radcliffe writes in her article "Embodying National Identities," (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1999, p. 214): "National representations are performed through public spectacle, each nation having its own genealogy of performance." Ultimately, it is the flawed nature, the unaffected presentation, and childlike infectiousness of Julia's performance that transcends and spellbinds. Martha is powerful, but is this enough? Do we really want to buy into a national icon that pole dances for attention? Perhaps more importantly, all in all, I don't know if I've ever seen Martha smile... genuinely.

 

a teaspoon of life

I was at my parent's house the other day and when my stomach growled for a mid-morning snack, I reached into the cereal cupboard and pulled out my dad's favorite cereal, Life. Upon opening the box and unfurling the neatly rolled bag, I found just a few crumbs barely filling a corner of the plastic.

"Mom, look," I called over to the next room. "Dad left just a teaspoon of Life in the bag. Why wouldn't you just finish that?"

Upon further inspection, I discovered that the aforementioned crumbs were about 90% sugar crystals. Aha! I thought. Well, who would want to eat a mouthful of sugar? And so it seemed that the not-very-scintillating mystery was solved.

But my mom was still stuck on what I had just said. "A teaspoon of life," she mused aloud. "What would that be? And would it be a good thing? Or not?"

Most of us want "full" lives. That is the word we so often use to describe having a fulfilling job, creating our own families with the ones we love, doing something meaningful, finding our own answer to the elusiveness of happiness. How can a teaspoon be that full?

A teaspoon is on the smaller side of spoon measurements for baking and cooking. A tablespoon, the biggest spoon measurement, is equal to about 3 teaspoons. Clearly a tablespoon of life would be a lot better than a teaspoon. On the other hand, there are 1/2 teaspoons and 1/4 teaspoons and even 1/8 teaspoons. Definitely worse.

But is it that simple? Is the answer to everything always bigger and more? There is a documentary directed by Christopher Bell called Bigger Faster Stronger. Bell is a wrestler-turned weight lifter-turned confused and disillusioned adult who chose not to take steroids while his two brothers both have taken them for years. The film description on IMDB reads: "In America, we define ourselves in the superlative: we are the biggest, fastest, strongest country in the world?" Bell takes as his starting point a follow-up question: Is this competitive and consummate approach truly bringing positive results? And so, I ask, would a billion tablespoons of life be better than a teaspoon? Is a huge athlete on steroids happier than a tall, sinewy MIT professor?

Can we measure life at all? And is that the way to advance towards what might actually be significant and meaningful? Most people would agree that you cannot measure love. But people dreamily seem to believe that you can measure life. Perhaps if you approached them with the question in a philosophical discussion, they would argue: no, like love, you cannot measure life. Nonetheless, so many people spend all of their time and money and effort compiling 'things': the biggest house on the block with the newest kitchen and entertainment room, the most luxurious SUV, the vacations to St. Barts and Jackson Hole, the kids and dog to fill out the picture. Often, there is never any discerning hard look at what they might actually want out of life... just that competitive, "superlative-ness" urging them onward towards bigger, better, best, most.

In reality, I don't know that a teaspoon of life would be all that bad. There is something elegant about a teaspoon, certainly more refined than the awkward bulkiness of the tablespoon. If you cook a lot, you know that when subtly directing a dish, you most often add a teaspoon or less of a spice. And that does the job. More and it wrecks it, overpowers everything else. And when baking, a teaspoon of salt (or less) is the key to bringing out all the sweetness of the pastry or baked good.

And what about even less than a teaspoon of life? In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book I find myself mentioning A LOT on this blog, Oskar is a huge Stephen Hawking fan. In the midst of reading A Brief History of Time, he finds himself feeling highly insignificant in comparison to the enormity of the universe and all of time. He approaches his father later that night with his concerns:

"When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. "Which problem?" "The problem of how relatively insignificant we are." He said, "Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?" I said, "I'd probably die of dehydration." He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?" I said, "I dunno, what?" He said, "Think about it." I thought about it. "I guess I would have moved a single grain of sand." "Which would mean?" "Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?" "Which would mean you changed the Sahara." "So?" "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!" "That's true!"I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!" "Which means?" he said. "What? Tell me." "Well, I'm not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah?" "If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?" "But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!" "That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together. (p. 86)

In this case, all it takes is a grain. One grain and the universe is changed. Isn't that encouraging? Isn't that exhilarating and buoying and reassuring? Perhaps all we need is one grain of life. We think too hard about having too much. We think we can't do something now because we aren't experienced or progressed enough. But we can. We just need one grain. We can all make a difference with very little. And if we all put our little grains together, just think about the huge pile we would create.

Perhaps I will go and share that teaspoon of life with the ones I love. It is more than enough.

say what you mean

Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.   (Lord Alfred Tennyson)

Thoughts arise and flow through the mind like ticker tape: coursing smoothly and quickly, creating abbreviations and personal shorthand, moving seamlessly and logically... until they reach our mouths. The articulation of those lucid thoughts is hard, if not sometimes impossible. What seems to gather in our heads in words actually form through firing synapses and traveling neurons. It probably looks more like a Civil War battle or a fireworks display in our heads when we think than an MIT physics chalkboard.

Why is it so hard to say what we mean to say? What we want to say? I can explain things fairly well when I write them down... but when I try and speak them, it's a lot more difficult unless I prepare. I especially have trouble recreating someone else's argument, even those which I have understood in the first place. But for some people, this process seems a lot easier than for others. I remember being in my high school Economics and History classes with a bunch of precocious boys who always seemed to understand every micro- and macroeconomic theory and be able to relate all historical events to current events I didn't even know were taking place. It was incredibly intimidating. In hindsight, though, I am not so sure their ability to articulate was so much better than mine. First, I think they just talked and talked until they basically drove over a body of knowledge or an understanding that was valuable. Second, I think that by talking their articulation moved towards lucidity. Some people work this way. Some people need to talk things out in order to think about them. Others, like me, need to process silently, internally, and perhaps write things down before articulating them well.

But it is still hard to say what we mean. Language often seems such a poor communication tool. This is most evidently the case when we try to express emotions. Again, this is something that seems to come more naturally to some and to be excruciatingly difficult for others. Why is this? Does it have to do with one's upbringing? Is it a quirk of the brain -- that those who are less skilled in logical articulation are more 'emotionally endowed'? Is it gender-related? Is it cultural?

In his article titled, "Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal" (American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4, Oct. 1996), Neil Delaney explains how we want our partners to love us for particular properties that we consider essential to who we are:

This is the most plausible construal of the commonplace expression, "I want my lover to love me for the right reasons." Similarly, when someone issues a complaint like "he only loves me for my body," this is best interpreted as that person's observation that her lover's love is focused on properties that she herself regards as peripheral.

What strikes me is that there is a lot of wishing and wanting and hoping going on in this article, but not very much expression of those desires. Delaney says as much later in the article:

Consider the following case: A identifies profoundly with his career as a painter, taking painting to be an intrinsically valuable activity. His partner, while loving A in good part because he is a painter, takes the painting to provide a basis for loving A not because it is an intrinsically valuable activity, but rather because it assures entrance to lots of flashy cocktail parties. In this case it appears that, while A may properly take himself to be loved "for the right sort of reason," nevertheless this perceived basis for the love may leave him unsatisfied. If this is right, we need to more precisely articulate the desire to be loved for properties you take to be central to your self-conception. A better approximation would be to speak of a desire to be loved for such properties where these properties are appreciated in a way not too different from the way you appreciate them.

Part of the problem seems to be that, within the context of the creation of a 'we', we desire much to 'just be understood' as if our partner is so close to us that we have established ESP. We ask too much of each other just as we often ask too much of love per se. Delaney again:

Here's an apparent inconsistency among people's wants with regard to romantic love: while on the one hand you seem to want to be loved unconditionally, at the same time you want your loved to be discerning. This is to say that the value you attach to the love received in romantic relationships relies upon your taking your lover to have some taste, which is just to take your lover to be the sort of person who wouldn't love a schmuck... Let me make the tension more explicit: while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you, as would be the case if the love really was unconditional, you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

It's funny because this is exactly the point my boyfriend was making to me the other day when he asked if I would love him if he went bald. Of course, I replied enthusiastically, thinking that this was the 'right' answer. But you just said I wouldn't look as good if I shaved my head, he responded puzzled. While not quite the same as 'becoming a schmuck,' his point was that I was being inconsistent... and that he didn't truly want me to love him whatever he became because that made me a sort of 'love floozy'. We want to be loved unconditionally and yet we want to be worthy of our lover's love. Does this dilemma add to the difficulty of articulating what we mean to say and what we feel? Who wants to articulate a self-contradiction?

I think there is more to the difficulty of expressing emotions. Sometimes people are not raised to be in touch with their emotions. Unfortunately, this happens a lot to boys in our culture. A book such as Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys addresses the 'tyranny of toughness' that boys face and how masculinity has been so narrowly defined as to be suffocating. But there is still a greater problem. The problem of language itself.

For the inarticulate can find its forms of articulation only within the already articulated, within, in other words, a language which is itself a sociohistorical construct, or, as Dale Spender puts it, a "language trap". "For we are language Lost / in language"... (Ming-Qian Ma, "Articulating the Inarticulate," Contemporary Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn, 1995)

Ma recounts Don Byrd's position that we, as Westerners, put too much stock in language as "an independent subjective structure that describes all ontological possibilities." Perhaps this is why I love writing poetry. Poetry tiptoes around the tropes of language and rejoices in the unexpected combinations of words, syntax, vocabulary, and phrasing that actually enable us to understand anew... and perhaps articulate more clearly.

Despite the difficulties in saying what you mean, it is always worth trying. Trying without frustration when the other party struggles to understand. Trying because trying is like watering the plant of love. Without trying to articulate what we mean, the love will wither... and maybe even die. Sometimes it's about letting go... letting go of anger, the presumption of honor, pride... letting go of all those 'properties of you' that you want the other person to appreciate. They might just appreciate them more... appreciate you more... if you can say what you mean... or as John Mayer puts it 'what you need to say.'

Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It's always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma.

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, p. 314

65 things to wonder about

1. I wonder why certain people really hate using their blinkers.

2. I wonder how to get from here to there.

3. I wonder why intercourse is a word for sex rather than something related to dining or driving. "Last night, the waiter served us the most amazing heirloom tomato salad for an intercourse."

4. I wonder whether I will get to read all of the books I want to read in my lifetime.

5. I wonder why we waste so much time when there is really so little time at all.

6. I wonder if governments will start monitoring our texts and tweets... "London Riots 2011: Protesters Use BlackBerry Messenger; Hackers Back Them"

7. I wonder what the percentage of technological advances used for "bad" purposes is.

8. I wonder how many terrible things that are brewing 'beneath the surface' will erupt into violence and disorder.

9. I wonder how much of life is motivated by inequalities of power.

10. I wonder what I will be when I grow up.

11. I wonder if I will ever "grow up."

12. I wonder if "growing up" completely is a good thing.

13. I wonder why Martha didn't create a more clever catchphrase than "it's a good thing."

14. I wonder why we deride the missteps of some (Amy Winehouse and Richard Hatch... remember him?), but forgive those of others (Martha Stewart and Kobe Bryant.)

15. I wonder how many people can actually truly and completely forgive.

16. I wonder which is better for the recipient... forgiveness or empathy.

17. I wonder why people say, "I can forgive you but I can never forget..." Of course you can't forget! Obviously, if it was something bad enough to require forgiveness, it must have hurt like hell.

18. I wonder why emotional pain is so physical.

19. I wonder why what made me so sad about the renovation of The Balsams Resort in Dixville Notch, NH was that they would probably get rid of the clinking radiators that used to put me to sleep when we stayed there.

20. I wonder why 'improving' things can be so upsetting to us.

21. I wonder why I've learned to love certain foods I hated as a child (tomatoes, eggs, salmon), but others still disgust me (peas, beets.)

22. I wonder what a miracle would really look like.

23. I wonder when the economy will improve.

24. I wonder when (or if) we will have another boom period like the 80s.

25. I wonder why standing on your head is so fun as a child and so frightening as an adult.

26. I wonder if I will ever be able to remember the name of that apple donut-type thing I used to eat at a bakery in Martha's Vineyard.

27. Oh wait! I think it's an apple fritter. Now if I could only remember where we got them...

28. I wonder why the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette hit me so hard.

29. I wonder why it's so hard to turn my brain off at night when all I want to do is sleep.

30. I wonder when bacon and chocolate became friends.

31. I wonder how it will all turn out.

32. I wonder why I love swimming but am terrified of open water.

33. I wonder why all pools don't use a saline purification system instead of chlorine and other toxic chemicals.

34. I wonder how many toxic chemicals we ingest daily without any knowledge.

35. I wonder why people at the gym have to spray that super strength disinfectant all over everyone around them rather than just on the machine.

36. I wonder why some people think gyms are social places.

37. I wonder how many long-term couples meet at gyms. ;-)

38. I wonder how many people can act truly selflessly.

39. I wonder if people who say "I promise I will change" can ever really change.

40. I wonder why people have to keep remaking films that were good in the first place -- Rear Window, Dirty Dancing, Psycho, Charade)

41. I wonder if we all think we can do it better than the other guy.

42. I wonder why people smoke.

43. I wonder why people hate.

44. I wonder why people spend so much of their lives angry.

45. I wonder how much of the "self" corresponds to the body.

46. I wonder why women ever try to put on lipstick while driving.

47. I wonder why people think there is a secret to happiness.

48. I wonder why happiness can be so hard and so fleeting.

49. I wonder what school will be like in 40 years.

50. I wonder what I will be like in 40 years.

51. I wonder why true love makes it hard to breathe.

52. I wonder how many married couples are really deeply in love with each other.

53. I wonder why people bother to get married if they don't feel that strongly.

54. I wonder what it will take to get my blog noticed.

55. I wonder how many alternate worlds I can imagine.

56. I wonder if they would actually be better places to live.

57. I wonder when I will get back to Venice.

58. I wonder why watching birds visit my feeder is so gratifying, so calming, so reassuring, so absorbing.

59. I wonder what happens to dreams we used to have.

60. I wonder why everyone doesn't believe in the possible.

61. I wonder what happens to all the feelings and thoughts of people who die.

62. I wonder why kids seem to have much better questions than adults.

63. I wonder why I wonder if I can when I know that I can.

64. I wonder how much doubt impedes our lives.

65. I wonder why everyone doesn't take the time to sit and wonder.

umbra out of the shadows

I love words. Not surprising, seeing as I am a writer. Sometimes I write quickly and add page upon page. Other times, I spend minutes, hours, lingering and laboring over a single word. Which subtle difference of meaning is best in this case? Which word adds to the rhythm, enhances the atmosphere, vibrates with the tone?

But when does a single word get to be in the spotlight, so to speak? Almost never. For tomorrow, take a word... and ponder its origins, its shades of meaning, its various definitions, its sound, its commonality or uniqueness.

For me, the word I chose is umbrage.

Most commonly, the word umbrage is used when someone takes offense at something. "New Hampshire hospitals take umbrage over cuts by legislature" reads a headline. Actually, I probably wouldn't use the word this way as the implication should be that one takes an offense over a social snub or something rude rather than a perceived injustice (as in this case.)

We have deviated from the original meaning of the word. Less common definitions of umbrage include the shade from foliage and finally a shadowy appearance. In 15th century France, umbrage was just this sort of shade beneath the trees... no negative connotation to the word at all. In his 1426 translation of De Guileville's Pilgrimage of the life of man, John Lydgate wrote:

... my vysage whiche is clowded with vmbrage...

And although we now only 'take' umbrage, it used to be given. Translating the Historie of the council of Trent, Sir Nathaniel Brent recorded in 1620:

He... therefore besought them to take away all those words that might give him any vmbrage.

Slowly, this notion of being in the shadows and feeling displeasure became intertwined. J. K. Rowling cleverly referenced this shadowy aversion in naming a character Professor Umbridge.

Yet, why did shade become a negative? Darkness makes sense, but the shade from trees is often a respite from heat and blazing sun. With a sense of this grandeur and protection, Milton wrote:

Where highest woods, impenetrable
To star or sunlight, spread their umbrage broad.

The root of the word, umbrage, is umbra... and this word has an important astronomical meaning. An umbra is a complete shadow, when the source of light is totally cut off... as in an eclipse. Check out Nick Strobel's cool explanation (and movies) of umbras and penumbras.

Here is a helpful diagram of a lunar eclipse with the umbra and penumbra labeled. By the way, a penumbra is the partial imperfect shadow outside of the complete shadow (the umbra.)

The umbra can also be the constant companion of someone or something... as in your shadow. In "Peter Pan," the lead character has a lot of trouble with his shadow. He loses it, just as he symbolically has no past. If, in a simple way, light represent happiness and knowledge and dark represents fear and ignorance, it is only with one set against the other that the totality can be understood. In simple terms, one can't understand happiness without sadness. And as children grow, the completeness of their experience becomes more like that in which there is a light source which throws their shadow into the scene. Wendy, who lives in a more adult and complete world, knows how to reattach Peter's shadow. Also, some kind soul took the time to remake his shadow....

For Peter, the reattachment of his shadow leads to the resumption of his total arrogance: "Oh, the cleverness of me!" and his singing of "I've gotta crow!" Here is the Mary Martin original version. Perhaps Peter's arrogance has to do with Patricia Cox Miller's implications in her book, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture:

The umbra -- shade, shadow, uninvited guest -- is invited in; as a dream, the guest becomes host to a sensuous pleasure that is all the more real for being an imitation, and all the more an artifice for being imaginal, "only" a dream.

Peter lives in a "dream world," a world of pure fantasy wherein all guests become part of his pleasureful imagination. Even Hook is a "fun" adversary for Peter. What is scary is "growing up" and the inevitable reality that comes with it -- the shadow that stays forever attached and is only, as Wendy points out "just a shadow."

Part of the strangeness of words is connotation. The innate sense we develop that a word is negative or positive. Umbra clearly has attained negative status. Yet, in many ways, it could present us with a completeness, a sense of fantasy, a playful imaginative state, or a relief from physical discomfort. I think today, as the rain pours down outside, I will revel in the umbrage that this ponderous weather enables.

have third thoughts

Second thoughts. We all have them. That bungee jump seemed like an incredibly good idea when we were sitting in our friend's living room, but now, standing on the edge of a huge cliff with only a bouncy rope to catch us... we begin to question our initial enthusiasm.

These uninvited thoughts can arrive when dealing with bigger things too... like having a child. In her July 31, 2011 blog entry on Anthropologa, the author writes: "I know it's only a few more days until this pregnancy is full-term, but, um... I'm not so sure this whole 'having a baby' thing was such a good idea." Turns out it was more fear than a real desire to reverse this irreversible decision.

Why second thoughts? It seems they so often emanate from places of fear. Well-thought out decisions are questioned irrationally in moments of panic. Brides or grooms get 'cold feet' when they have doubts about committing to that one person for the rest of their lives. Why cold feet? Apparently, this phrase has its origins in a Stephen Crane novel and was also used extensive in 'the Great War' when soldiers whose feet were handicapped by frost-bite could not proceed in battle. The term extended to cover all those men who feared entering combat. What I find interesting about the term is the physicality of it. Are second thoughts, then, more related to a gut reaction, to something we feel in our bones, whereas the initial decision may have been sited in our heads?

If you consider the two situations posed above (the bungee jump and the baby), they seem to suggest two different things about second thoughts. In the first case, second thoughts might be a good thing. A quick, perhaps peer-pressured decision is reevaluated. On the other hand, having doubts about the baby is both panicky and irreversible. Most people (I stress most) plan to have babies -- at least it's usually outlined in a couple's life plan. Thus, there is not a need for reevaluation so much as there is a need to face -- head-on (and quickly!!) -- concerns and apprehension about what the reality of a child will entail.

The brain is a funny thing. It seems as though we should be able to trust our thoughts, but so often that is not actually a good idea. These thoughts are OUR thoughts... they are not objective, nor always realistic. Often, people can so manipulate their own thoughts or perceptions so that they believe themselves to be something they so obviously are not. Look at Bernie Madoff or O. J. Simpson. So, are second thoughts more trustworthy? Or is it the process of rethinking that is the most dependable of all?

In that case, I would argue for third thoughts... and fourth and fifth... not to the point of indecisiveness, but rather as a continual process of self reevaluation, of reconsidering what you thought you knew, of thinking from new angles... basically of learning and growing. Second thoughts are also a hint, a nudge from your unconscious that you may not have all the answers. In that case, they may warrant a discussion with other people in order to see the situation through other eyes. Certainly good things CAN come out of second thoughts. Handel revised his Messiah because of second thoughts. A bomb was not dropped. A hurtful phrase went unsaid. Heidi Montag wouldn't have had all that plastic surgery. Certainly, I am going against the grain here to disagree with Malcolm Gladwell that the best decisions can usually be made in a "blink" and on instinct. I just don't see that to be the case.

In a broader sense, second thoughts as a people enable us to reconsider scientific, economic, or historical problems that appeared to have been resolved but were mistaken. We once thought the world was flat being one of the most obvious examples.

And have second thoughts proliferated as we become more disconnected from ourselves? The sociologist Robert Nisbet suggests in his book, The Quest for Community, that "it has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. It will not do to relegate it to the realm of symbols which influence intellectuals and which do not, at first thought, seem to implicate the lives of others in society." As we are more alienated from each other, we are equally more estranged from ourselves. If this is the case, then our process of rethinking may be a process of reconnection to what we should have considered in the first place... but were too distracted or withdrawn to recognize.

Of course we will always have second thoughts. Decisions have to do with the future... and thus with the prediction of what our future selves will look like... and those are constantly changing. When we decide something, we are basing that decision on an anticipation of what our future self will look like. And, as we all know, that can change. Perhaps what is reassuring (rather than destabilizing) about second thoughts is that they are an assertion of our human autonomy. In her article, "Second Thoughts: Revoking Decisions Over One's Own Future" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LIV, No. 4, December 1994), Jennifer Radden addresses just this notion:

A central expression of autonomy is found in our ability to make a plan for ourselves and adhere to it. Emphasizing this view, Joel Feinberg argues that when a voluntary commitment is made, freely, on the basis of principles, and with alertness to the possible consequences which might ensue, it should be honored. He quotes with approval from Arneson, "The root idea of autonomy is that in making a voluntary choice a person takes on responsibility for all the foreseeable consequences to himself that flow from this voluntary choice" (p. 86). Others have put the point even more strongly. Full freedom, claims Schelling (p. 98) "entails" the freedom to bind oneself, to incur obligation, to reduce one's range of choice. In order that I be AS FREE AS POSSIBLE, Charles Fried insists, it is necessary that there be a way in which I may commit myself by making non-optional courses of conduct which would otherwise be optional for me.

I do not mean to take issue with the claim that the freedom to bind oneself is at the heart of our notion of autonomy: it seems incontrovertably true. However this aspect of autonomy is matched by another 'root idea', and another capability entailed in the notion of full freedom. A different expression of autonomy which is equally central, I would argue, is found in our ability to change our minds in the light of new ideas, beliefs, and desires. Failure to acknowledge this second expression of autonomy, and overemphasis on the first, has misled some thinkers, of whom Feinberg stands as a distinguished example, when they examine the moral status of advance directives, that is, of decisions we make designed to bind ourselves at some future time. More precisely, it is because of a failure to acknowledge the second root idea (our ability to change our minds), and its conflict with the first (our ability to plan ahead and take responsibility for the outcomes of our decisions), that Feinberg concludes advance directives should be morally binding and should be appropriately honored.

So, for tomorrow, acknowledge your ability to change your mind, your ability to see anew, the reality that you change at every moment and so the decision you initially made for yourself might not be right. Trust yourself, yes, but also allow room for the thoughts in your head... the ones that emanate not from a place of fear but from a place of growth.