The Chronicle of Higher Education, of all places, dropping the true science today:
People who indicated strong negative feelings about their ex in the immediate aftermath of the breakup were less likely to be depressed. The subjects were re-tested a month later, and those whose feelings had grown more negative also generally felt better….
I think this falls neatly into the category of “Things We Kind of Already Knew But It’s Nice that Science Has Confirmed Them.”
Yep.
How do you feel about random strangers who touch your child? (I don’t mean that kind of touching–I leave those posts to Theodore.) I’m talking about people who come up to our baby’s stroller and put a hand to his face. Or encounter him in a booster seat at the coffee shop and pick him up for a hug. You wouldn’t make anything like that much physical contact with an adult, except through clothing–a slap on the back, say, and even that can feel intrusive. Yet, when it comes to people who are even less able to defend themselves, or reject the approaching contact, it’s somehow considered okay.
The other night, at a local restaurant, our son was picked up out of his booster seat three times in the course of the meal–twice by one person, and again by another. That last new pal was particularly memorable: He was a white-haired grandpa, a Kirk Douglas lookalike, who got up from his seat to stop by our table, chatter with our little guy, engage him thoroughly, and then–with a rather endearing awkward pause–ask us, nicely, “may I pick him up?” He was with a nice-looking older lady, his wife or girlfriend, and she chatted with us while he and our son had their little moment.
A moment like that is awkward, and it makes my innards clench. But I say yes anyway–at least, when the baby-picker-upper asks first–because I want to believe that we are not living in the deeply toxic stew of pathology we sometimes feel we are. After all, we’ve all spent 30 years marinating in the idea that predators are everywhere. Missing kids appear on milk cartons, and nobody’s allowed to play outside unattended anymore. You can locate the sex offenders in your neighborhood in a moment’s Googling, and I certainly have. But you know what? We really aren’t living in a sea of dangerous people. Yes, there are freaks and crazies out there–but everyday middle-class life does not encounter them except in statistically insignificant numbers. I want to believe–and I live my life as if I do believe–that even in New York, the crazy-street-dude capital of the planet, you can meet someone at dinner, allow him to snuggle up with your child, and come out of it not having had a dangerous moment but with a pleasant memory of a local eccentric granddad who liked your kid. It’s almost life-affirming. Almost.
A beautiful day in Russia, 75 degrees and sunny, and it’s been a whole six weeks since someone last blew themselves up in the subway. But the Russians, never ones to shy from dark thoughts, are thinking and talking about China, and the latest batshit insane trend: murderous rampages in kindergartens.
There was another one today, this time with seven children stabbed to death by a guy who lived in the same building as the kindergarten. It’s just the latest in a string of these, all seeming copycat versions of the original kindergarten-stabber, who was executed at the end of last month.
So the taxi driver and I had a conversation about that on the way to Stary Arbat this morning. He was talking fast, and had a thick Georgian accent in Russian, but I got most of what he was going on about, especially when he repeated “sick” three times to describe the killings. Russians, you might remember, have already lived through the worst atrocity committed against schoolkids in memory–the mass hostage-taking and botched rescue attempt in Beslan that left 186 children dead. So when you see them outraged, you know it’s something bad.
In China, it’s not just that someone is killing these kids; they’re not even doing it like the Stockton maniac with an assault rifle. They are stabbing them. It’s almost too much to comprehend. I mean, what context would cause someone to hack a bunch of little kids to death? Wealth inequality? Oppression of the farmers? Communist doldrums?
I’m usually all about finding the root causes of societal outrages–part of my work here in Moscow is to look at the motivations and desperations of the most recent subway bombers–but it seems that in these China killings, there is nothing to be understood.
Oh, this is hilarious. An outfit called the Hotchkiss Brain Institute is saying that new dads start producing new brain cells.
I have no idea about how good their science is, especially from this little press report. I also know perfectly well that more brain cells does not equal better brain cells–otherwise, elephants and whales would be running the world. And that the conventional view that we get dumber as we age and shed brain cells, or kill them off with alcohol, or whatever, is hopelessly oversimplified. (As I understand it–which is to say, superficially and not necessarily correctly–we lose cells over time but add interconnections, which matter more.)
That said, the clear implication here is that fatherhood makes us smarter, and that’s where I dissent. More empathetic, maybe, but brainier? The past year, with minimal sleep and constant distraction, has been the least informed, the least thoughtful, the most distracted of my life. I can barely focus on anything printed for more than a few thousand words, which is kind of a liability in an editor (though dandy in a blogger). My memory has gone completely to hell. I have to write everything down in notes to myself or it’s gone, poof. I forget people’s names on the way to meet with them. I lose track of conversations in midstream. I drop key parts of explanations, baffling those around me. The other day, while working on a story and interviewing a source by phone, I so lost the thread of my own question that I had to just abandon ship and ask something else entirely. I lose things around the house that I never lost before. My head is an absolute sieve…huh! Hey, look! Over there! Something shiny!!! Oooh. What was I talking about?
