Poetry of a Generation

I PREDICT: in 30 years the "Dangerous Minds" equivalent "teacher inspires inner-city youth to fulfill beautiful artistic potential" movie will forget silly old Bob Dylan and instead quote Li'l Jon and the Eastside Boyz.

And why hasn't Shatner covered it yet?

Follow my nose

The past few days I have been smelling things a lot. "They" say that smell is strongly linked to memory, and my non-scientifically-backable anecdotal experience is piling up the support. In the past few days I have had these intense memory-triggering experiences:

1) While riding in a car with a female friend, some combination of her shampoo/deodorant/lady scents vividly connected her with feelings of an ex-girlfriend. I was crazy about that ex, and she was a fox and a half, and the girl I was with in the car is a strictly platonic friend. It made me feel things in places. I sort of suppressed the thought until I bumped into that same ex-girlfriend at a concert the very next day. I couldn't think of a gentlemanly way to say "The other day I smelled someone who smelled like you [used to smell] and I found it extremely compelling, like in an immediate sexual response way," so instead I just said "It's nice to see you!" and hoped the point got across.

2) Today while at work it was very muggy and hot outside and very air-conditioned inside, so when people opened the door the various drafts of air were quite noticeable. Again, some indefinable conspiracy of scents ignited a vivid memory of playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time in my friend Evan Pease's basement on his Nintendo (or Super Nintendo, respectively). I was transported back in time to those sleepover nights eating the snacks and playing the game console(s) my parents wouldn't buy for me. But amidst this wave of mutant-turtle memories, I was jolted back into the present need for chai lattes and double chocolate chip frappucino blended cremes. Bummer.

In both instances I was so connected with the memory that it overtook all of my senses for a moment. As far as my brain was perceiving, I was not in that car or that Starbucks in 2007, I was with a girlfriend in 2000 or in a basement with a buddy in 1996. My entire sensory experience was flushed by the olfactory cue. It was a curious sensation, not at all unenjoyable. I've often said that my sense of smell is probably my only sense worth anything (given my need for glasses, mediocre hearing, undistinguished palette, and assumably average sense of touch). It reminds me that supposedly people secrete pheromones similar to those that animals use to communicate, but we ruin them with all our bathing, deodorizing, and perfuming. I'm willing to bet that, if the pheromone idea has any truth to it, it's no surprise that these two scent memories connected to sex in the first instance and a familial feeling of safety in the second. The next time someone tells me I smell good, I'll try and find out just how good that smell makes them feel.

For further illustration: see Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Dusting against the wind

What's the point of dusting? I'm being totally serious here, I don't get it. If there is dust on your stuff you may want to get it off, but is the air above your stuff truly best place to put the dirt? I assume that once the duster-imposed flurry of air has subsided the dust simply settles right back onto the surface from whence it came. Is there something about the mechanics of dusting that I don't understand?

Why is dusting seen as such an integral part of cleaning? In the thousands of years that people have been brushing off their tchotchkes you would think someone would have developed a better system. Even the robot maid from the Jetsons dusted! (In fact, I think cartoon maids are often shown dusting. I believe cartoons to be interesting windows into cultural attitudes, so Rosie shows that we naturally assume that we'll be dusting our moon bases.)

As a person who is allergic to dust, I don't want all my dust particals redered arisol for easy inhalation. But I also don't want dust to build up, waiting for me like an evil lurking skin growing over my stuff. Can dusting somehow reconcile these two ideas? If it hasn't so far, I don't see how kicking up another cloud is going to help anything in the future. Perhaps what the dusting technology and practice needs is an entire paradigm shift.

Photoshop Phriday

Borrowing the idea of Photoshop Phriday from achewood seems only fitting, as the entire idea of this blog was partially inspired by the blogs of the fictional achewood cast. True to form, mine is lower-tech and has 1/10,000th the readership. But, I submit, the potential for hilarity is at least equal, and quite possibly greater. I've been saving up for a good one.

Last month I was insanely busy. I was teaching a class, which I may expound on later, and the world of coaxing 12-year-old inner-city kids to be creative pretty much devoured a solid month of my life. At the end, I wanted to do something fun, something personally creative, something social that would tell the world "I am a man who is in charge of his own life again."

I present to you John E. Mack, 1972, versus John P. Mack, 2007.

(click to enlarge)

What you are looking at is my father's ID card from his first post-doctoral position at NASA in Houston next to a picture of me taken only a few days ago. The shirt, hair, and mustache are all real. Previous to this incarnation I was sporting a smartly-trimmed goatee (see to the right). People have been asking what prompted the change, and I'm pleased to leave them with "It was about that time."

The reactions have been great, particularly from my father himself who (in the words of my mother) "was quite tickled that I would go to such lengths to mimic him." My dad definitely has a distinct style. He has never paid much attention to his "look," which is what makes it so legit. He is unmistakably a college professor and scientist from toe to tip. The 70's were an era of outrageous clothing and hair (facial and otherwise), and my dad basically cruised through with a handsome, (relatively) conservative, nerdy style that helped him land a wonderful wife, a great job, and (come 1977) a beautiful daughter. Thanks to heredity, here I am 35 years later, similarly nerdy, similarly handsome, and only slightly more educated about the subtleties of looks. People have always said I look like him. I figured now was an opportunity to see how close it could get. Answer: mighty close.

It seems that Mendel may have been on to something. Or, as my friend Aron put it, I "truly [am] the fruit of his loins."

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Editor's note: Regardless of this being a digital picture posted on a blog, this was a pretty low-tech operation, notably because I don't have a scanner, digital camera, or Photoshop. The picture of me was taken with a cell phone, the ID image was a picture of a picture also taken with a cell phone, and the whole thing was pieced together in iPhoto and Microsoft Word. A slight elongation of my face is due to the tiny round lens of the cell phone camera, and I tried to blur out the shadows of my glasses on my cheeks, but other than that I assure you there is no digital magic happening here. I wouldn't know how to do digital magic if it was waiting on the couch behind me. But I can't deny genetics.