Category: People & Human Interest

From a hockey game in Norfolk. Worth watching through to the end. Trust me. (Except for one woman’s inexplicable laugh.)

A great column on the Hefner engagement from Timothy Egan.

“Men who sniffed drops of women’s emotional tears became less sexually aroused than when they sniffed a neutral saline solution that had been dribbled down the women’s cheeks.”

In Women’s Tears, a Chemical Cold Shower

Studies show that the more self-expansion a person experiences through their partner, the more satisfied and committed they are to the relationship.

To learn more about the science of sustainable relationships, read the full article, “The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage.”

And to learn more about your own relationship, take the quiz below to measure how much it expands your knowledge and makes you feel good about yourself.

The Sustainable Marriage

Works for relationships as well as marriages I assume.

Take 21 minutes and find out that happiness is up to you.

Dan Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness. Here is what I wrote about the book 3½ years ago.

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Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness. This is an informative and funny book by a Harvard psychologist that explains how our brain, mind, memory and emotions work — and why they lead us to such poor decisions about what makes us happy.

As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”

Trust me, too.

First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.

Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.

… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …

“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”

Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.

The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.

Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.

Grandpa Joe and Secretariat: A Christmas story from Roger Ebert’s Journal

Before I go, Tanya has written a letter to her grandmother. You should read it.

Hasta la vista. I’ll send you a postcard.

Some of my longer-term readers may remember the occasional appearance of the Sheriff of Santa Fe County in these pages — a score of links and few of his comments. Sheriff Solano resigned last month (his term was about over).

Greg Solano appears to have sold more than 1,000 items stolen from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office on eBay, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. The former sheriff’s financial problems, which he says drove him to sell the stolen goods, are nothing new, though: The Santa Fe Reporter documents two decades of financial trouble.

Solano admitted to embezzling items from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and selling them on eBay when he resigned last month. And it appears that his admission did not show the full extent of his thefts.

New Mexico Independent

Too bad. He seemed like a good guy.

At Dinner without Crayons Jill writes about dogs and the fear of dogs. Her essay includes this:

Now, not all of my kids want to get a dog. Aidan sometimes says he’d like a fish, or a hamster, or a unicorn. But he doesn’t ask for a dog…because he is petrified of them. He always has been. He’s not just scared of big dogs. He’s scared of every dog, even if it is on a leash, even if it is shaking and appears to be 150 years old, even if it is wearing a tiny Burberry sweater and sitting in an heiress’s purse.

Amylynn writes about the high cost of Broadway elementary school musical production.

And Jill writes about some of the less magical aspects of visiting Walt Disney World.

And a great photo from Elaine — Red Sky.

John Tierney reports that the Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness and that concentration seems to make us happier. An interesting article that includes this finding:

Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

Roger Ebert has a followup to his blog post that I linked to last Saturday, “All the lonely people”. Today’s sequel begins:

I had no idea. For days I’ve been reading waves of messages from the lonesome, the shy, the alone, the depressed. Some who live as virtual hermits. Some who have few or no friends. Some who rarely speak with their families. Some who have never dated, or ever had sex. Some who consider it a good day when they never speak to anyone. Some who are sad to be alone. Some who are relieved. Some who can’t do it any other way.

Both of Ebert’s posts are excellent.

Already mentioned for its good lines, this piece about loneliness from Roger Ebert is just superb.

NewMexiKen’s very own parents eloped 68 years ago today. She was two weeks past 17, a senior in high school. He was 19 and in the U.S. Navy.

I don’t think getting married at 17 and 19 is a good idea, but I’m sure glad they did.

I am procrastinating finishing up today’s birthday post and was reading about procrastination instead. I found this in James Surowiecki’s “What we can learn from procrastination” in the current New Yorker. I think you should try this explanation the next time you miss a deadline.

You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

It’s an interesting essay, if heavy on the philosophy at times. Here’s one more sample to get you to put Surowiecki’s article on your reading list for later.

A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

NewMexiKen’s very own grandfather, John Louis Beyett, was born in Alvord, Texas, 129 years ago today. He died before I was born, but I met his mother, my great-grandmother when I was 8-years-old. She was born in 1865 and was just 15 when my grandfather was born; the first of her nine children. She was 87 when I met her (and lived to be 93). It has always amazed me that I met an ancestor who was born the year Abraham Lincoln died.

My grandfather was French-Canadian on his father’s side; Scots-Irish from Kentucky on his mother’s. His first wife died in 1918 giving birth to their sixth child. That child died then too, but the older five lived normal lifespans, though three had no children of their own. I met my four half-aunts and one half-uncle, but just a few times.

A few years later, at age 42, my widower grandfather married my 33-year-old never married grandmother, Lulu Cook. Only she too, his second wife, died in childbirth. That was in 1925 and that child survived. It was my mother. Mom ended up being raised by her mom’s brother and his wife (grandpa and grandma to me growing up).

Though I’d never met my grandfather or knew much about him, I always thought how tragic (if not uncommon) to lose two wives in childbirth. What a melancholy man he must have been by the time he died of a heart attack at age 62.*

And then a few years ago, thanks to the internets, I discovered all was not as it had seemed. Just 10 weeks before my mother was born to his wife of just one year, my grandfather had another daughter born. Her mother’s name was Hernandez and it was their third child together. This was in Laredo, Texas.

It’s a miracle any one of us is here at all.
_______

* My mother, grandmother and grandfather died at ages 48, 35 and 62. I don’t include them in any life expectancy charts. My dad, grandmother and grandfather died at 83, 90 and 90. That’s THE family I use.

Well, three links actually.

My niece Amylynn proves better than DNA could that we’re related when she grumbles, “What the hell is with greeters in every single store?” Read what she has to say — They make me mean – I can’t even help it.

The Melbourne, Australia, Catholic archbishop wants funerals to be about God and not a celebration of the deceased, so he’s banning football club songs and popular music at funerals — Catholic Church bans footy theme songs at funerals. It’s an interesting little discussion, but I link so you can scroll down and see the list of “Most unusual funeral songs.” *

And in Reefer Gladness Timothy Egan discusses California’s Proposition 19. He begins:

It was early still, and daylight, so when I called up The Dude to get his take on new polls showing California on the verge of becoming the first state to legalize, tax and regulate recreational use of marijuana, I knew he wouldn’t be, um, distracted. Not just yet.

Who’s opposed (other than the moralists)? The liquor industry, the medical marijuana industry and the drug cartels.

* I don’t want a funeral, but if there is one, please play Cee Lo Green’s current hit.

Among the winners of MacArthur Grants — $500,000 — are David Simon of The Wire and Treme, Annette Gordon-Reed author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Familyand Emmanuel Saez of Cal Berkeley who studied the economic impact of outstanding kindergarten teachers.

The New York Times has more.