The Pen is Mightier Than the Cord

Writing about writing may seem like a bit of a strangely circular endeavor, a potentially vicious cycle, kind of like photocopying a mirror. You know, someone once told me that if you try to photocopy a mirror you will create a wormhole into another dimension and be sucked away forever. I don’t think I buy that completely, but, kind of like saying “candyman” three times alone at night, I’m not gonna push my luck.

However, while I won’t mess with wormholes or crazy scary pincushion guys with heads full of bees, I will valiantly write about writing, come what may.

Chances are, you think talking on the phone is a better way to communicate than writing back and forth. I can say this with confidence because using a photon based, nitron fueled algorithm patented by our engineering department here at Love Dub, we have determined that upwards of 80% of people believe this to be true.

Sure, plenty of people prefer email for small stuff, but when it comes to communicating with loved ones, most people put down the pen and reach for the phone, be it rotary, touchtone, or cellular.

Let’s take a time out here for a second and remember that I used to have a phone, back in the early 90’s, that let you pick whether you wanted it to be touchtone or rotary. If you picked rotary, when you punched a number you had to wait and listen to that many clicks before you punched the next number. Huh? Can someone please explain this to me? Did anyone ever actually pick the rotary setting? Isn’t this kind of like a car that has the option of setting it to go no faster than a horse?

But I digress. If you are one of the many people who think talking on the phone is better than writing, I urge you to reconsider.

Nothing beats talking in person (except for a few situations discussed below), but if you can't have that, writing is better than talking on the phone. There are many reasons for this. One is that the phone allows you to hear someone in real time, but not see them. You miss all the little facial expressions, body language, etc., that make communicating in person so dynamic. With writing you don’t expect these things, but when you hear someone’s voice, whether you know it or not, you do.

Writing allows you to take your time and get your thoughts down without interruption. You can read it over, make sure you are saying what you want to say, and send it along knowing that the other person can take their time reading it, re-reading it, and reacting in their own way in their own time.

This benefit of writing is especially useful for dealing with difficult situations (e.g. resolving arguments) between close friends and/or lovers. In fact, this is when writing can be even better than talking in person.

Trying to talk through a fight can be very difficult, especially if emotions are still raw. It’s hard to say exactly what you feel and, once you try and the words are out of your mouth, it’s even harder to take them back. Additionally, you may not even get to finish what you are trying to say because the other person might interrupt you. Even if they don’t verbally interrupt, the look on their face may throw you off and stop you from saying what you meant to say.

Moreover, the other person has no choice but to react immediately, without a chance to think through what they feel and want to say. Thus they are more likely to say something they don’t mean, or will later regret.

Writing solves all of these problems. Whether used as the sole method of communication during a fight, or just as an initial step to lay the groundwork for later, in-person discussion, writing can make a huge difference for people trying to come up with a good process for resolving conflict.

Don't get me wrong, writing (specifically emailing) does make it possible to have very poorly thought out, quick, impersonal communication. But it can also be used for very rich interaction.

The phone, meanwhile, conveys voice, which seems to promise meaningful interaction, and though it sometimes can deliver, it too often comes up short because it lacks the layers that are supposed to come with the voice.

The phone is like a painting of bacon. The colors look right, the texture looks right, and if done well enough you might even salivate. But without the smell, and most of all the taste, it's just a frustrating tease, which, if taken too literally, will get you tossed on the ground outside the museum after trying to take a bite out of the canvas.

So next time you’re feeling frustrated with your communication and you’re on the verge of doing something crazy with a mirror and a copy machine, do us all a favor. Put the mirror down, and pick up the pen. It can be a real pen, or the new age pen called “keyboard”. Either way, it is truly mightier than the phone, whether corded, cordless, rotary, touchtone, that crazy hybrid rotary-touchtone, or cellular.

Text or Cheat

On November 3rd, David Brooks, in his column for the New York Times, wrote about the New York Magazine’s sex diaries. These diaries are accounts that people send in of their strategies, adventures, successes and failures in the pursuit of sex.

What strikes Brooks is that technology, especially texting, has allowed people to find casual partners more easily than ever before. He tells of how the diarists will text multiple possible partners on any given night, hedging their bets and keeping one or two potential hook-ups on the back burner in case their first choice falls through.

Brooks believes that this turns romantic relationships into a cold marketplace of commodities where humanity is lost. He yearns for the good old days when courtship was long and drawn out and a suitor had to talk to grandma for hours before getting to so much as hold hands with the object of his affection.

Meanwhile, NPR’s “This American Life” did a show on infidelity in which they brought up some interesting facts. For example, 50 percent of Americans will cheat on their husband or wife at some point in their marriage. Most of these affairs will begin and end without ever being discovered, but unlike the tree that falls in the woods, they still count.

And, here’s the interesting thing: This number hasn’t changed appreciably as technology has advanced and cell phones have allowed us to text our way into meaningless sexual encounters.

So, who knows, maybe it was all the slow-motion courtship that led people to get married and then wake up one day wondering what it would be like to have a bit more excitement in their life. They never got to have meaningless sex, so they wonder what it’s all about and decide to risk their marriage to find out.

This isn’t a column about cheating; we here at Love Dub International Headquarters are solidly on record with our belief that there is a special place in Dante’s Inferno set aside for cheaters. Though if 50 percent of us do it, that special place is going to need bleacher seats.

But that aside, what’s interesting is to think about what will happen as more and more people grow up in, and experience, the technology driven freedom of sexual encounters that Brooks laments. Will people end up as amoral commodity shoppers, never to have a truly intimate emotional encounter again?

Or, alternatively, will people end up LESS likely to cheat because the world of meaningless sex, or even commitment free sex (which doesn’t have to be meaningless), is something they’ve already experienced?

We can imagine a married man who comes across a woman he is attracted to who is not his wife. If he has only a small amount of experience with “the game” and she shows interest, he might be taken in by the excitement of this new type of encounter. But if he has spent years on the texting for sex circuit described in the New York Magazine diaries, maybe he is better able to reject this new potential partner in favor of protecting his marriage.

Now, granted, some of those 50 percent of people who cheat do it because they fall out of love with their partner or into love with someone else and their cheating has less to do with the excitement of a sexual encounter (not that this spares them a front row seat in the inferno). Their choice might have been the same even if they had undergone a rigorous tour on the casual encounters circuit before getting married.

But as more people do spend a few years “playing around”, facilitated by technology, at least some of them will decide to make a commitment to a marriage because they have grown tired of the commodities market dating scene. And when they meet that stranger with a twinkle in his or her eye at the supermarket, they’ll know that it leads to a place they’ve already been, and chosen to leave. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll pick up the bag of diapers from aisle four and head home, happy with their choice and knowing full well what they’ve given up.

As advertised

Sarah Haskins, the comedian responsible for the “Target Women” series on Current TV was interviewed on Talk of the Nation the other day. The title of the interview was “Why marketers are wooing women all wrong”. For the next fifteen minutes or so, Haskins, the interviewer, and various call-in guests proceeded to lampoon ads for everything from mops to deodorant.

Their point was that companies are coming up with absurd and insulting ad campaigns to sell things to women. And they kept asking why. Why would these companies do this? Now we here at Love Dub have never claimed to be the sharpest reporting staff in the shed, but if we were going to go out on a limb we might say that these ads continue because, well, they work (gasp!).

Let’s take a look at some of the examples that were discussed on the show. One was yogurt. Evidently yogurt commercials always show women eating the yogurt. Crazy. I mean, come on! Seriously? Yes. It’s always women doing the consuming of the yogurt. Why would companies not have men in the commercials? Believe you me, if they thought it would make them more money, they would. One thing we can all agree on is that American Corporations are out to make money. So the answer is, the best way to make money in the yogurt business is to market the yogurt to women.

How about deodorant? Men’s deodorants have scents like power, ice, and maybe even Thor. But women’s are all named after flowers and other petalled flora. Is this all wrong? Are companies losing female customers because there are hordes of women out there who want to smell like Thor? In a Love Dub double blind top secret poll carried out with absolutely no hint of IRB, FDA, IRS or any other acronym carrying agency’s approval, only one woman claimed to want to smell like Thor, and she later admitted that she though we said “thorn” which she took to mean “rose”.

Again, if deodorant companies could sell more deodorant to women by calling the scents more powerful sounding names like axe, ninjitsu, karatika, or Sparta, they would. But I guarantee they have polling data much more scientifically done than ours that tells them that isn’t so. And, don’t forget, if you’re looking for strong sounding names, Secret is strong enough for a man, it’s just pH balanced for a woman.

The other theme that came up in this interview was that Ms. Haskins thinks it is insulting to women that these commercials suggest pleasing a man as a reason to buy a product. For example, a commercial might suggest that women buy a certain razor so that their legs will be smooth for their man.

Holy Toledo. First, let’s point out that men’s razor commercials do the exact same thing. Make your face smooth so she’ll like it. But, more importantly, why exactly is it insulting to suggest that women and men both spend a lot of time and money to make themselves more attractive to potential mates?

There are always people, men and women, who will insist that they aren’t getting dressed up to go out to a club for anyone but themselves. Right. Take 100 straight women and tell them to dress anyway they want for a night out at a club with no men or cameras and guarantee they won’t ever see any of the other 99 women again and then see what they wear (or whether they even go). And the same goes for 100 straight men with no women, 100 gay men with no men, and 100 lesbians with no women.

Advertising companies know that we are driven by a desire to impress and attract mates and so they appeal to that aspect of our nature. It isn’t absurd; it’s smart business. Ms. Haskins’ question shouldn’t be “why are companies making these ads”, it should be “if these ads are so offensive, why do we keep buying what they’re selling us?”

It is certainly way “cooler” to say that you don’t care what people think, that you are above all of that, and that you buy what you want and dress how you want without taking anyone else into account. That line may be strong enough to impress some of those same people you are claiming not to care about impressing, but it’s pH balanced for a big plate of BS.

The bottom line is that, just like the birds who spend countless hours preparing a nest to attract a mate, we dress, shave, and perfume ourselves up for one main reason. You can pretend it isn’t so all you want and rail against commercials that take advantage of it. But, guess what? If you do, chances are your main motivation is to appeal to a mate who finds that kind of anti-establishment attitude hot. So lambaste all you want, and when it gets you a date, layer on the Thor (or the Thorn); we won’t tell anyone.

Age of Enlightenment

Harold and Maude. I don’t know if you’ve seen this “classic film” but if not, let me save you the time and sum it up for you. Teenage boy obsessed with going to funerals and faking his own suicide meets 80 year-old woman also obsessed with death. They steal a tree and next thing you know they are sleeping together. Then she dies for real and he decides to stop faking his own death. A real knee slapper, that one. This is cougar-ville taken to a whole new level.

In keeping with the age discrepancy theme, a new movie is out called “An Education” about a teenage girl who falls for an older man. It’s actually a very good movie, so I won’t ruin it for you by telling you what happens. Not like my friend Tim from high school who used to love watching The Usual Suspects with people and telling them half way through the movie who Kaiser Soze was. Shade-y.

But as for “Harold and Maude” and “An Education”, people come away from either movie wondering whether it is really possible for a teenager to love an adult. In fact, is it even possible for a teenager to love in the same way that adults do?

Let’s take a step back and look at the ridiculous age based rules we have in our society. You have to be 16 to drive a car. You can’t vote or serve in the military until you turn 18. But even then, you can’t legally drink a beer. At age 21 you can finally buy a beer legally but you can’t rent a car for another 4 years. And for those constitutional scholars out there, you can’t serve in the House of Representatives until you are 25, Senate until you turn 30, and can’t be President until you’re at least 35.

But what will really bake your noodle is that, in many states, you can be tried as an adult and put in prison for the rest of your life without parole when you’re as young as 12.

So, let’s recap. At age 12, when you are in 6th grade, you can’t drink, drive, vote, serve in the military, rent a car, run for the House or the Senate, or be President of the United States. But what you can do is be held accountable for a crime the same as any adult.

Say what?

But what about love? This is, after all, Love Dub. Essentially we’re saying that a teenager isn’t responsible enough to drink, drive, fight, or vote. But at the same time they are mature enough to have to take full responsibility for their actions. All the bad parts about being an adult without any of the fun stuff.

So, do we trust them to love? Well, if we put love in the category with the other fun stuff, the answer would be no. We deny kids the fun stuff. So no love for you.

But love isn’t always fun, right? I mean, look at Harold. He falls in love with Maude and then she goes and dies. So maybe kids should be able to love.

Did I just equate love to life in prison without parole? Yikes. I would never do something like that. Marriage, maybe, but certainly not love.

The truth is, there are some very mature teenagers out there, and some extremely immature adults. There is no one size fits all rule that will ever encompass everyone. But it is fairly clear to anyone who has ever taught, raised, or viewed from a distance, a group of teenagers that they still have a lot of brain development to come. It doesn’t take an fMRI to tell you that.

So no, Harold’s love for Maude isn’t real love, and neither is Jenny’s love for David in “An Education”. We can’t blame the children for thinking they are in love. But we most certainly can expect the adults not to take advantage of a young and still developing heart.

Young children and, yes, teenagers too, are learning about love and life, and they will make mistakes along the way. We would never force a 12 year old girl who is seduced by, and falls for, an older man to spend the rest of her life with him. And neither should we force a 12 year old who commits a crime to spend the rest of his life in prison for it.

At the very least, until we change those laws, those same kids who are susceptible to being charged as adults should be treated as adults in other ways too. So get ready for a horde of 12 year-olds drinking a beer with one hand, filling out a ballot with the other, all while driving down the street in a rental car on their way to register for front line duty in the marines.

Moldy Mortifying Mementos

What do you do with old letters, cards, and other romantic type mementos from prior relationships when you start a new one?

I think we can all agree that one thing NOT to do is go the route of the boyfriend of the reader who submitted a story to my Valentine’s Day story contest last year. You may remember that this knight in shining armor gave his new girlfriend a box of candy that happened to have a note in it written to his PREVIOUS girlfriend. Oops.

B. Cereus for a minute; how many spores were on that chocolate after a year in semi-opened dankness?

But we digress. The point is, giving old notes addressed to ex-partners to the new partner is low on the list of good things to do with your old notes.

So what should you do with them? This is a question that plagues more people than you might imagine. Whether in a shoe box, an old torn up folder, a trapper keeper (those things were awesome), or tossed into the corner of a drawer, many of us keep the notes we’re given.

Clearly, these days we’re more likely to collect emails than written letters, and while you are in a relationship with someone maybe you put a special label on their emails. Maybe they’re all in a neat little folder called “Love Dub”. Actually, if you did that we’d have serious copyright issues and the Love Dub legal department would have a field day. There might be fisticuffs. They might even send a guy after you armed with a triton, so I recommend against that. Use your partner’s name instead for labeling purposes.

Point is, it’s very normal to save these things. But then you break up and what do you do with them? Throw them away? You could. And some people find it cathartic to make a bonfire with all that old stuff. But others hold on to them. Why? Some think there’s a chance that the relationship will start up again in the future and these letters will be a cherished collection to show the grandkids. Some think a friendship will ensue and the letters will serve, one day, as a jolly reminder of how two good friends used to date. And some save the letters because, for the life of them, they can’t bring themselves to throw anything away.

Of course, by keeping them around you risk them being found by your new partner. And this begs two questions. Do you want your new partner to read them? Probably not. But if your answer is “I don’t care” that leads us to the second question. Is it morally sound to show those old letters to your new partner?

Perhaps not. There is a trust between two people when they are dating that allows them to share thoughts and feelings that they wouldn’t normally share. A breakup, especially if it is relatively amicable, should not signify a rescinding of everything once covered by that trust.

If you want to share them, your best bet is to de-identify them and submit them to Mortified, a grass roots, amateur comedy show in various cities across the country. They take volunteers who are willing to read parts of their old journals, letters, poetry, or whatever else you’ve got, on stage. Check it out at http://www.getmortified.com/.

Actually, the show mostly consists of people reading things from their childhood. It’s much funnier that way. And it avoids the awkwardness of reading something about someone who you just broke up with and who might just be sitting in the audience.

And that is actually a pretty good guideline to go by. If you saved notes from when you were in middle school, they’re probably pretty funny, and harmless enough to keep. But notes, emails, and cards from recent relationships should be tossed. Or de-labeled in the case of gmail emails. Those kinds of notes are written between two people who think, at the time, that they might spend their lives together. Once they decide not to do that, the notes should go too.

The one possible exception is if you and the ex have become friends. But even then, it may well be detrimental to the friendship to have reminders of a time when you were more than just friends lying around. If you’re done with the romance and genuinely committed to nothing but friendship, toss the old love letters away.

Sometimes it’s hard to do, maybe harder than you thought. But it’s an important part of moving on. And you really have to do this right, no half attempts. Just when you think you’re done, go check the box of chocolates. It’s the one place we always forget to look.

Over Nurturing

Last month I witnessed an interaction between a mother and 2 year-old daughter that made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. The mother was trying to get her daughter to drink some milk out of a sippy cup and the girl was refusing. Actually, she wasn’t just refusing, she was throwing a temper tantrum, crying and banging her hands on the table.

We were on a ferry boat, in the crowded main cabin, so this was drawing a bit of attention. The mother tried feebly to calm the girl down but quickly gave up and gave the girl what she wanted. Coke. That’s right. Coca-Cola Classic. It does a body good.

So the girl got her coke and I got a little bit of vomit. Doesn’t strike me as all that fair of a trade. But c'est la vie.

There’s no question, with this particular incident, that the girl was being spoiled by her mother. But what about things that parents do that are considered good, progressive parenting? Is it possible that these things are just as bad for kids as filling their bottles with coke?

Terry Gross, on NPR’s program Fresh Air, recently interviewed Po Bronson who, in addition to having a pretty awesome first name, is the author of “NurtureShock, New Thinking About Children”. And, according to Po, there are a lot of things we are doing with the best of intentions that are actually hurting our children.

By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, no one here at Love Dub International Headquarters is receiving, or has received, any free lunches, pens, pencils, scratch paper, crayons, or anything else edible or used for writing purposes from Po Bronson or from NPR.

Okay, now that we’re morally cleansed, on with the column. One of the most interesting arguments that Po makes is that it is bad for children when parents don’t fight in front of them.

Huh? That’s right. When parents “go upstairs” or in some other way separate themselves from their children when the parents are arguing, kids suffer. Kids know their parents are fighting, no matter how hard parents try to hide it. But what happens when they go into another room is that kids don’t get to see the conflict worked through and resolved. Kids are left with an uneasy feeling that something isn’t right and this affects them as they develop socially.

But, on the other hand, if kids see their parents argue AND resolve the argument, it helps them build important interpersonal skills that will benefit them throughout their lives. I’ve argued for a long time that being comfortable with conflict is essential to a healthy relationship. Now it seems it’s also important to raising healthy kids.

In fact, I’ll go one step further and hypothesize that children who never see their parents fight (and resolve the fight) openly never get comfortable with conflict. And they become the adults who can’t deal with fighting in relationships. They are the people who panic at the first sign of conflict rather than working on a good process for working through that conflict when it arises.

Po goes on, in the interview and in the book, to talk about how we underestimate the importance of sleep for kids. A students average 30 minutes more sleep per night than B students who average 30 minutes more than C students. And yet we, as a society, think that high school should start at 7am and parents too often let their kids stay up watching television until much too late. Parents figure that as long as kids are able to get up in time for school they’re getting enough sleep. But not so, it would seem.

He also talks about how we are hurting our kids when we praise their intelligence. Instead we should be praising their effort. Intelligent kids who are told how smart they are all the time tend to only be willing to attempt things that come easily whereas kids who are praised for working hard will apply their intelligence to things that come easily and things that don’t.

If a child does well on a test and is then told he or she is very smart, that child goes on to think that they are smart because they did well. So if they are faced with something that appears difficult and that they may not be able to perform well on, they panic, thinking they will not be seen as smart anymore.

On the other hand, a child who is praised for how hard they worked on the test will work even harder on something that seems difficult because they have learned that working hard is what is important and valued.

There’s a lot more interesting stuff in there but I’ll have to let you listen and read for yourself. I’ve got to go start working on my new idea for a company. I’m calling it Traveling Conflict. And the slogan: “We fight for you”. For a small fee I will send a couple to your house to fight in front of your children. And don’t worry, under no circumstances will we fill their cup with coke or tell them how smart they are.

Textual Intercourse

The other day I was talking…well, okay, skyping…with a good friend of mine who is spending the year in India. He told me he had recently purchased a scooter to get to and from work. I live in San Francisco, so as part of my rental agreement I have to think highly of scooters. I praised his newfound method of commuting and then asked the first thing that came to mind. “Do you have a helmet?”

Yes, he said, he has a helmet. Well, in my extensive experience (read: watching Slumdog Millionaire twice) I haven’t seen a lot of helmets on the streets of major Indian cities. So I asked him what percentage of other scooter riders wear helmets. 20%, he said. But get this: Most of them don’t wear the helmets on their heads. They hold them in their laps.

At first I was confused. But then it hit me. Brilliant! These riders are clearly protecting both their means of reproduction and their cell phones while all the while surreptitiously texting.

All this talk about texting while driving laws here in the good old U, S of A won’t do any good. If people will sacrifice their heads to keep their cellphones text-ready, they will surely be willing to risk a small fine.

So all these laws will accomplish is to force texting while driving underground (or under helmet, so to speak). People will keep their phones lower in their laps, making them have to squint at the screen to see what they are trying to read and thus taking their eyes off the road for longer and longer.

The problem is that we’ve gotten so sucked into a world of instant gratification and instant communication that we can’t handle waiting even for trivial interactions. Most texts, emails and calls are far from urgent, but we don’t want to wait even to read things like “who you go to the show with last night?” and “I didn’t got to the show last night” and “My sister-in-law’s baby cousin Tracey went to the show and she said she saw you there….you ain’t got to lie, Craig, you ain’t got to lie”.

Okay, so maybe I just saw Ice Cube’s “Friday” for the 20th time. But the point is, we live in a culture that has, for the most part, forgotten about the value of being alone with one’s thoughts. We’re either texting, talking, writing or reading email, listening to music, watching tv, or sleeping and dreaming about sending more text messages. Not many people take a walk or a car ride alone in silence, with the radio and cell phone off, just thinking.

“So what?” you might ask. Well, people’s brains are starting to atrophy. At least the part of the brain that thinks independently. People are relying more and more on external input, whether from friends via text message or from opinionated talk show hosts on the television or radio. If Glenn Beck sounds so confident, maybe I’ll just let him do my thinking for me. It’s a lot easier than doing it myself. Of course, that misses the point that psychotic people are often very confident in their delusions but that’s a subject for another day.

We send and receive texts so quickly we don’t think about what we’re texting, or what we’re doing while we’re texting. The 24-hour news cycle is constantly producing new information and opinions on that information, and we can check it and recheck it all the time. To write a letter, sit and think about it, edit it, think some more, and eventually send it is becoming an antiquated endeavor.

Forget about stopping texting while driving for safety’s sake. If we don’t carve out some text free, tv free, radio and music free time in our lives we’re going to become a nation of Glenn Beck listening automatons driving around town on scooters with our helmets between our legs, texting with both thumbs, steering with our knees, and assuming Glenn will tell us when, and if, we need to turn left, or right, or stop.