Good morning.
I know that
you can hardly wait to know how I spent the majority of my time between mid-September
and early November (apart from traveling), so I'll tell you. (Hint:
this short narrative is also a suggestion to anyone who wants to give
their children a record of part of their lives that they can carry into old
age. My story reflects my unfulfilled
goal to be a historian.)
Elliott's
birthday was November 3. As presents for
him, I did a couple of archival projects.
After pulling all my emails and text messages with/from Krystin for the
volume being prepared, I realized that Elliott and I had exchanged many such
messages as well. Given how he and I use
them (frequently and often on matters of substance), I decided to copy and
paste all the text and email messages into an MS Word document. (As I may have mentioned about doing so with
all of the messages with Krystin, this is a tedious and time-consuming process
because there are a lot of extra spaces, formatting oddities, and extraneous
text in these messages.)
I apparently purchased my current
cell phone in May, 2014, because that's how far back I had text messages. So I went back that far and copied all the
messages through May 2018, and I also transferred all our email exchanges
during the same period. (I didn't
include the purely logistical ones, of course, like "meet you at the corner
at 5:00.") The document totaled 421
pages (!); I titled it "Four Years of Electronic Conversations with
Elliott: Weather, Food, Politics,
Travel, School, and More." Although
I hadn't noticed before, it seems that he writes almost as much as Krystin did!
In addition to the text and email
messages, I finally printed a large number of the photos that Kathy, her son
Spencer, and I took during our two weeks together with the two boys in Italy in
2016 and put them in an album (well, 3 albums).
Photo albums for me are a great
deal of work. When I inherited all my
parents' albums, they were mostly falling apart; the glue was failing, the
pages were yellowed, the bindings were disintegrating. So years ago I learned that the best way to
preserve photos is to buy acid-free pages, use acid-free double-sided tape to
attach the photos, print labels for the photos, and put each page in an
acid-free transparent plastic page cover.
It took me about two weeks to select pictures (all saved
electronically), get them printed, and then mount them on the pages and write
the labels. (I did discover, courtesy of
Krystin's lifelong friend Christine, who's an assistant professor of art
(photography) at Northern Michigan University, something called "Snapfish." I could download my selected photos to their
site and pick them up at a local Walgreens; the miracle is that they have the
photos ready within an hour or so after I enter the order. So getting photos printed these days is
extraordinarily easy.) I believe in
continuing to print photos. There is, in
my mind, no guarantee that photos in the cloud will still be there in 10, 20,
30 years; the only guarantee is to have a physical copy of them.
When I gave both the 421 pages and
the 3 Italy albums to Elliott on his birthday, before we took him out to
dinner, I think he was nonplussed, although he liked the Italy photo albums. I was dismayed to learn that he had over 100
of his own pictures from that trip--which I hadn't known about. I didn't recall him taking many pictures. So I obtained his; he also dictated his
commentary on the photos. I integrated
them into the 3 albums. He did pull a
couple of random pages out of the email/text transcript and was amused at what
he read, about events he'd completely forgotten about. I told him that in both cases, these were not
items for this year or next, but something he'd enjoy in 20-30 years.
Elliott inadvertently bore witness
to my concern about losing photos on cell phones. He took many more than he had to give me;
they were on his cell phone. At the time
of the trip he downloaded quite a few to Facebook, and those are the ones he
provided to me. Those he didn't download
at the time have disappeared—because that cell phone died, taking the photos
with it. (Of course, he could have
avoided the problem if he'd downloaded them all at the time, but I don't blame
him much because we aren't always assiduous about such mundane tasks.)
So the
answer to the question about what I did for six weeks is "put together
Elliott's birthday presents."
The sequel
to the story is that I finally decided, yesterday, to begin the process of
sorting through Krystin's photographs.
She took hundreds of them, but she made my job fairly easy because she
was a careful curator of her photos.
Most are in albums devoted to a particular time or place (travels in
Europe with her friend Mike when we lived in Scotland, high school, travel with
Elliott to San Francisco, travel to Vienna with the family and my brother and
sister-in-law, and so on). Those that
were not in albums she had grouped neatly into "family" and "middle
school" and "vacations," etc.
Elliott will inherit 3-4 of the albums
(and many of those bound in rubber bands) because many of the photos include
him and his parents. The remainder I
will disperse to Krystin's friends, to the extent they want them. The one that most breaks my heart is a huge volume
with photos of her travels across Europe, carefully divided and labeled by city
and country. She clearly put hours of work
into compiling it, but it contains no pictures of anyone I know except Krystin
herself—it is her memories of Europe, but her memories are gone. I wish I knew of some positive way to dispose
of the album.
* * *
A sidebar
to the preceding tale. I'm going with "a."
[aelarsen.wordpress.com/why-an-historian/ A Historian Goes to the Movies, explaining
why he uses "a" rather than "an"]:
Obviously in English,
we use the indefinite article 'a' before words that begin with consonants and 'an'
before words that begin with vowel sounds. 'However, h',' is a very weak
consonant. When it's the first letter of a word, sometimes we pronounce it (as
in 'happy') and sometimes we don't (as in 'honor' or 'hour'), so sometimes it
takes 'a' and sometimes it takes 'an'.
In the case of 'historian'
and related words ('history', 'historical'), we technically pronounce the 'h'.
If you say the word aloud all on its own, the 'h' is clearly there. However,
the accent in 'historian' is on the second syllable, not the first, so there's
a tendency to de-emphasize the 'h' and say something a little closer to 'istorian'.
So when the 'h' starts to disappear, 'an' starts to be more acceptable.
In the 18th and 19th
century, the standard rule was to say 'an historian', but over the course of
the 20th century, American English has tended to shift away from that and say 'a
historian'. But British English still tends to say 'an historian'. Although I'm
American, I grew up watching a lot of British television shows and apparently
this somehow crept into my English, because 'an historian' simply feels natural
to me and 'a historian' feels clumsy. Every time I try to say it the American
way, it just feels ugly and wrong. So the title of this blog is "An
Historian Goes to the Movies".
[grammarist.com]:
In all main varieties
of English, the use of an as the article preceding historic (an historic) is an
unnecessary affectation. The rule for the indefinite article is that we use a
before words beginning with a consonant sound, and an before words beginning
with a vowel sound. The h at the beginning of historic is a consonant sound,
soft though it may be. As far as we know, there are no modern English dialects
in which the h in historic is silent (please correct us if we're wrong), so
there's no reason for anyone to use an instead of a before the word.
The same applies with
the words historical, historian, and so on. They start with consonant sound, so
their article is a.
An historic appears
about a third as frequently as a historic, even in some normally well-edited
publications. . . . But in most edited
writing, whether British, Australian, Canadian, or American, a historic is thankfully
more common than an historic.
* * *
This is
sort of "well, duh" research, but the data do provide ammunition for
arguments about public policy. Researchers
at the Stanford Medical School learned that "compared with U.S. states
with the strictest gun control legislation, gun deaths among children and
teenagers are twice as common in states with the most lax gun laws." There's another dark side to their
findings: "states with laws that
restrict children's access to guns have lower rates of firearm-related suicides
among youth, even after controlling for other factors." The data were presented at the American
Academy of Pediatrics 2018 National Conference.
Personally, I think the health sciences (medicine, public health,
nursing) can provide considerable insight into the gun problem in this country.
The
statistics are little scary. "A
child is 82 times more likely to die in our country of a firearm injury than in
any other developed nation. . . . We
focus a lot on the federal government and the things they can do to protect our
children from firearms. But our study shows that what states do at the state
level really does have an impact." A
pediatric surgeon, medical director of trauma care at Lucile Packard Children's
Hospital Stanford, where her role includes investigating how to prevent serious
childhood injuries, commented that "if you look at what causes injury
deaths in U.S. children, sadly, firearms are always in the top five."
To put the
numbers in perspective: looking at 2014
and 2015 data from the Centers for Disease Control (which keeps statistics on a
wide array of events), one learns that about 2700 children (ages 0-19) died
from firearms injuries. "Of those
deaths, 62.1 percent were homicides, 31.4 percent were suicides and the
remaining deaths were accidental, of undetermined intent or the result of legal
interventions." They ranked the
laws of all the states using a standard scale to evaluate gun laws and looked
at socioeconomic and demographic factors as well ("unemployment rates,
poverty, urbanization, alcohol dependence, tobacco and marijuana use, and high
school graduation rates. The analyses also accounted for the strictness of gun
laws in each state's neighboring states and the number of registered firearms
per 100,000 children in each state").
Basically, they found that the states with the strictest gun control
laws had child deaths from firearms at about half the rate as states with loose
laws.
Like I
said, no surprise. When will anything
happen?
* * *
OK, I'll
admit to a little fatherly pride. Here's
Elliott's website with his paintings; he's still playing around with the site (there
need to be more paintings on the home page).
He tells me that he is willing to consider commissions. In my opinion, one of his greatest talents is
portraiture, so if you have kids, grandkids, others, maybe pets that you want
painted. . . .
https://brushwizard.com/
* * *
If true, then we can no longer be
labeled a successful society. "At
the core of all successful societies are procedures for blocking the
advancement of bad men" (Paul Collier).
On that same theme, here's (second U.S. President) John Adams, who must
be spinning in his grave: "May none
but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." (Adams was the first president to live in the
White House.)
* * *
Schadenfreude,
the sense of being pleased at others' misfortune, was the subject of large
review of 30 years' work in several of the subdisciplines of psychology by
researchers at Emory University. I
suspect that many of you, like me, had never given much thought to the
sentiment. These people did and came up
with hypotheses that are at least interesting.
(The term itself translates from the German to "harm joy" in
English.)
They
propose that schadenfreude "comprises three separable but interrelated
subforms—aggression, rivalry, and justice—which have distinct developmental
origins and personality correlates."
There is a common element underlying it all, they surmise: "Dehumanization appears to be at the core
of schadenfreude. . . . The scenarios
that elicit schadenfreude, such as intergroup conflicts, tend to also promote
dehumanization."
They define dehumanization as "the
process of perceiving a person or social group as lacking the attributes that
define what it means to be human. It can range from subtle forms, such as
assuming that someone from another ethnic group does not feel the full range of
emotions as one's in-group members do, all the way to blatant forms—such as
equating sex offenders to animals."
They go on the say that "the
propensity to experience schadenfreude isn't entirely unique, but that it
overlaps substantially with several other 'dark' personality traits, such as
sadism, narcissism, and psychopathy."
One
challenge is that there isn't any widely accepted definition of schadenfreude. Moreover, some see it as "malicious, while
others have perceived it as morally neutral or even virtuous. . . . It's kind of a warm-cold experience that is
associated with a sense of guilt. It can make you feel odd to experience
pleasure when hearing about bad things happening to someone else."
There are
three theories that can be used in considering schadenfreude. One is envy theory, "a concern for
self-evaluation, and a lessening of painful feelings when someone perceived as
enviable gets knocked down a peg." The
sense of justice arises with deservingness theory, which "links
schadenfreude to a concern for social justice and the feeling that someone
dealt a misfortune received what was coming to them." The third, intergroup-conflict
theory, "concerns social identity and the schadenfreude experienced after
the defeat of members of a rival group, such as during sporting or political
competitions."
One of the
aspects of schadenfreude that the researchers looked at was how it played into
child development. "Research
suggests that infants as young as eight months demonstrate a sophisticated
sense of social justice. In experiments, they showed a preference for puppets
who assisted a helpful puppet, and who punished puppets that had exhibited
antisocial behavior. Research on infants also points to the early roots of intergroup
aggression, showing that, by nine months, infants preferred puppets who punish
others who are unlike themselves. When you think of normal child development,
you think of children becoming good natured and sociable, . . . But there's a dark side to becoming
socialized. You create friends and other in-groups to the exclusion of others." Things don't get better as kids get
older. Maybe that's why middle and
senior high schools can be such awful places for some. "Spiteful rivalry appears by at least
age five or six, when research has shown that children will sometimes opt to
maximize their gain over another child, even if they have to sacrifice a
resource to do so."
The
principal factor that militates against widespread schadenfreude—and, I would
think, helps preserve civilized society!—is "the ability to feel empathy
for others and to perceive them as fully human.
I hope not
to feel schadenfreude about any of you at any time!
My best.
Gary
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