Highly suggestible drinkers

In the Co-op parking lot today I saw a minivan with a couple of big door magnets advertising Kangen water. “Change your water. Change your life,” they said. I encountered this stuff for the first time last summer, when I stopped in for a little while at a hippie cooperative house down the street.

Kangen water comes from special purification machines that you hook up to your tap. The machine evidently does something to “ionize” the water and make the pH more basic. The water we usually drink, the hippies told me, is too acidic. The dude who had actually purchased the machine and brought it to share with his co-op buddies also said something about the machine making the water molecules smaller (and thus easier to swallow?). 

Sellers of Kangen machines make all sorts of attention-grabbing health claims about their special water. Joint health, immune support, detoxification, anti-cancer, anti-aging, flatulence control—the usual litany. All the hippies assured me it was legitimate. The general consensus was something like, “Yeah, I definitely feel a difference when I drink it.”

A quick google of “Kangen water,” though, will reveal these health claims to be—at best—questionable. The websites are filled with pseudoscientific gobbledy-gook and meaningless graphics. Kangen sellers basically claim that water—that most essential ingredient for life as we know it—is incorrectly structured for our bodies. They don’t just claim that common tap water has junk in it that should be filtered out. Water in general, they say, can be improved upon. How it happened that life got so far on inferior product isn’t mentioned.

The door magnet I saw today also provided this web address: www.drinkkangen.com. Looks like honest business to me. And here’s the real kicker: Kangen machines cost on average three to four thousand dollars.

Yeah. Th-th-th-thousand.

That anyone with wits enough to save that kind of money could be taken in by such obvious snake oil is a genuine marvel. Or maybe it just underscores the ease of getting a credit card in this country. These charlatans must be making sales, though, because some of the sites clearly took a fair amount of time and energy (but not much intellect) to create.

And like I said, I saw living proof of the Kangen sellers’ success just a few blocks down the street. The funny part of it is that the guys drinking it all claimed the water really had an effect. I don’t doubt they believed it. I’ll bet the owner of the minivan I saw today genuinely believes it, too. And they might truly feel something.

But whatever they feel when they drink this miracle water isn’t coming from the water, it’s coming from their minds. It’s just the power of suggestion. They read this falsely esoteric marketing copy telling them the water will give them health and energy, and then when they drink it they work themselves up into feeling healthier and more energetic. They feel it because they want to feel it. 

The magnet I saw today also said, “Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?” Who wouldn’t want to have that problem solved, and who wouldn’t want to believe it could be done with just a little machine that sits on the countertop? It’s almost like modern-day idolatry. People pray to the Kangen machine, and somehow it does seem to actually make things better.

Our thoughts and emotions are so closely linked to how we feel physically that it’s basically impossible to identify the physiological effect of any one food, drink, vitamin, etc. People will swear that drinking kombucha eliminated their sinus issues, or that flaxseed oil in the evening makes it easier to get up in the morning, or that goji berries make it easier to breathe, but it’s unlikely they would claim these things had they been given these foods with no foreknowledge of their supposed benefits. 

I did in fact read just this afternoon a comment from a guy on a health blog swearing that regular kombucha keeps his sinuses clear (after years of problems). Do you think that if he had no idea what kombucha was and you slipped him a regular dose of it mixed in with orange juice that he would feel any difference? Like, “Oh my god, how is it that my sinuses are staying so fucking clear?” I doubt it.

I know from my own experience that the good feeling I get from making healthy choices is difficult to parse into intellectual and physical components. A healthy dinner of, say, a salmon salad does indeed feel good in my body, but there’s also a good feeling from knowing that I made a better choice than if I had eaten a burger and fries, like all those other American schlubs. I feel smart, and a bit proud, and those feelings contribute to the energy I have when I go for an after-dinner bike ride or whatever.

So when I say to someone, “I feel good because I had fish and vegetables for dinner,” I can’t claim that I feel good just because of the magic omega-3s or beta-carotene. I think those things are good to have in your diet (and there’s certainly more genuine science supporting them than there is for Kangen water), but I know that much of what I feel comes from reading health and fitness blogs that tell me I should feel good for eating those things. 

So even on the level of salmon and vegetables versus burger and fries it’s hard to pull out the placebo effect. When you get down to the hyper-specific level of trying to determine the effects of different types of salmon or different growing methods for a certain vegetable (which many people do) it becomes even harder. Are minute changes in a vegetable’s chemistry truly noticeable?

There seems to be good science backing up the health benefits of grass-fed beef, for example. But do I feel a difference eating grass-fed beef regularly versus the conventional stuff? I’m not sure. The health benefits (if true) are only observable over decades. So if I feel a difference on a day-by-day basis, it’s probably more mental than physical.

And yet you could still probably get some people to pay top dollar for grass-fed beef even without presenting credible science supporting it. You could just give it a snappy slogan like “Change your steak. Change your life,” and people would buy it. Tell them a grass-fed steak will make them feel better instantly, and you’d have people saying, “Yeah, I definitely feel a difference.” 

I’ve never seen a seller or proponent of grass-fed beef make any New-Agey, quick-fix health claims like this. They tend to be very moderate in their approach. I’m just trying to point out that the power of suggestion is very powerful indeed. It can even convince people that ionized water is the cure for the common cold. 

It’s sad to see marketers so shamelessly exploiting people’s suggestibility. But I guess it’s also kind of funny to watch the hippies take the bait.

The mathematics of teamwork

I am sick of sitting through meetings and being forced to work on things in groups. In the past couple of days I’ve come up with an airtight mathematical formula to determine the probability of a meeting being an effective use of time:

P = 100 * (1/2)^(n-1)

where P is the probability (as a per cent) of a meeting (or team project) being effective, and n is the number of people involved in said meeting or team project. 

So a meeting of two people has a 50% chance of being effective. That sounds about right, doesn’t it? You sit down with one other person, and it could go either way, really. It depends on the nature of the project, it depends on the two people and their chemistry (or lack thereof), it depends on the time of day and the weather. But generally when I sit down to talk with just one other person, I say to myself, “Well, maybe this will be a waste of my time and maybe it won’t. 50-50.”

As soon as you start adding beyond one other person, though, your chances of effectiveness plummet exponentially. Each additional person cuts the probability in half. A meeting of 5 or 6 people still has a slim chance of being worthwhile, but once you get a meeting of 8 or more (which I had just yesterday), you’re looking at probabilities of effectiveness below 1%.

What does this irrefutable mathematical fact say about our cherished principles of the democratic workplace? Well, it says what we all knew all along, which is that those cherished principles are a damned lie. Most problems are best solved in solitude. Groups of people suck at actually getting things done. 

A group composed of people who have all been working hard in solitude might (might) come together at the end of everyone’s individual efforts to make something great. But a group of people trying to decide shit around a conference table will rarely do anything.

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Postscript: An implication of my formula is that a meeting of one (a solo project) has a 100% chance of being an effective use of time. Obviously that isn’t true, since solo projects frequently fail. But then, that might be taking the mathematics too literally.

Post-postscript: Another implication is that a meeting of zero (guess that means everyone stays in bed that day) has a 200% chance of being an effective use of time. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from that.

The sit-and-stare

This afternoon I had a nice sit-and-stare. That’s where I sit on my couch and stare out my window. No music. Just staring. A snack or a drink might be involved, but not always. I try to just look out the window and let that be enough for me. It helps that I have an expansive view these days. Still, I would try to get in a good sit-and-stare once in a while even when I lived in a place that looked onto a boring neighborhood street.

I think the sit-and-stare is something people don’t do enough of—not adults, anyway, and not in this culture. We feel pretty uncomfortable when we’re not distracting ourselves with work, entertainment, or socializing. We grow older and forget the art of daydreaming. An extended period of unproductive observation of the world makes us feel either bored or guilty.

I know we feel this way because it’s exactly how I felt this afternoon. I hadn’t done a proper sit-and-stare for a while, and if I go too long without doing one I forget that it’s actually a good thing. I didn’t really plan my sit-and-stare this afternoon so much as I just let it happen. I was at a loss for what to do next. I had taken care of the chores and preparations for the coming work week, I had gone for an hour-long bike ride, I had read a bit of my book, I had checked my email, I didn’t care to try getting together with anyone, I was fed, watered, tea-ed, bathed, and otherwise satisfied in my immediate physiological needs.

So I sat down feeling anxious about finding something more to occupy myself with. The standard 21st-century solution to this problem is to spend some time mindlessly clicking through garbage on the internet. I can’t claim I never employ this solution, but I’m happy with myself whenever I manage to avoid it. To do so I have to do like recovering addicts  when they remind themselves that, no, that hit of dope ain’t gonna make me feel good, it’s gonna make me feel bad. I just have to remind myself that there isn’t a fucking thing on that internet that I truly want to look at right now.

I managed to avoid the distraction this time and sit in my nothingness. For the first few minutes I felt restless, but then I started actually paying attention to what was outside my window. I was reassured in my indolence by the sight of two gulls on the chimney of a house across the street. They were doing exactly what I was doing—sitting and staring. They were hunkered down against the wind and cold, but they looked unbothered to be doing anything other than exactly what they were doing at that very moment.

I could only assume they had taken care of the major gull business of the day. Any necessary food-finding, nest-building, and crow-fighting were out of the way, so they were free to just be. They didn’t engage in any bird small talk, and they didn’t seem to notice the lack of entertainment. 

Animals are better than humans at the sit-and-stare. They don’t trouble themselves with “keeping busy” when it isn’t necessary. It’s an admirable quality. I understand that some human cultures do a better job of following the animal example. I’ve read accounts of Westerners living with indigenous tribespeople and being frustrated by the way the tribespeople would “pay visits”: they’d sit silently in their host’s house (maybe smoking, maybe sipping tea) for 45 minutes, then say, “Well, we must go,” and walk out the door. Somewhere in Western civilization a screw came loose that prevents us from being so comfortable in our elemental nature like that.

I don’t know what I really get out of the sit-and-stare. I suppose one thing, almost involuntarily, is ideas—but not useful ideas like the kind you can get money off of, only useless ideas like the kind that generate blog posts. There’s something good in the sit-and-stare, though. Life feels more confusing when I don’t put forth the effort to do nothing. 

A bit of nothing reconnects me (in a not at all cool or sexy way) with a certain animal part of myself. And if something can get me closer to being like an animal—doin my business and not givin a fuck—I’ll take it.

Language is meaningless

The title of this essay isn’t totally accurate. But it reflects how I feel at the moment, and I figured a title like that might be attention-grabbing. A more accurate title would be “Language is arbitrary” or “Language is circular.” Those statements aren’t news to English majors, readers of Saussure, or thoughtful people in general. We all know language is largely just built on itself. But the truth of this was brought home to me last night in especially vivid light.

I was tutoring my Mexican lady, and as usual we were going over vocabulary questions she had from the reading she had done since our last meeting. She speaks English pretty competently, and according to a test she took with the literacy council, she reads it at an eighth-grade level (whatever that means). Last night, though, her questions were baffling me.

Take the previous sentence. “Though” was one of her questions. She had come across it in her reading, and she tried to look it up herself. The dictionary told her it was both a conjunction and an adverb. I had never known that. I often pull out the dictionary when tutoring. It can be helpful for articulating definitions of words we use so often that we never think about them. Not so in this case:

though, conj. in spite of the fact that.

Well, okay, that’s a pretty good definition, but what about “in spite of?” What does that mean, when you really think about it? I flipped back 51 pages to see what I might find under “spite.” For a second, it looked like the dictionary was going to do me a double favor by defining the whole expression:

—Idiom. in spite of, notwithstanding; despite.

Jesus. How the hell are you going to explain “notwithstanding” to an ESL student? It’s not quite the same as teaching a word like “chair,” where you get to just point at the fucking thing. 

I realized that a dictionary isn’t useful until you finally land on a definition consisting entirely of words the reader knows. If you were especially unlucky, your student might ask about some Word of Infinite Regress that would have you flipping back and forth through the dictionary for the rest of your life.

I can’t recall exactly how I ended up explaining “though.” I think it involved a fair amount of weird gesturing. And examples, those always help. If you give enough context, people can pretty well intuit the meaning of a word even without a comprehensible definition. I think my explanation came through, more or less, but it was completely exhausting. I kept foundering on overly complicated details, self-consciously realizing that the only thing I could offer was more and more words. I wanted there to be some kind of Look I could give her that would telepathically impart my knowledge. 

Once we finally dispensed with “though,” we moved on to other questions. “Struggle” came up, in the context of people “struggling with alcohol.” Thinking I might have better luck, I turned once again to the dictionary:

struggle, v. to contend vigorously, as with an adversary or problem.

Yeesh. The dictionary makes me cry.

Errors and retractions

I think I have to take back some of what I said in my previous post. I had a dream last night where I was solving some kind of three-dimensional puzzle, and there were a lot of visual elements that I could describe in intricate detail. My sense of sight really was engaged.

Maybe instead of writing an entire essay on the nature of the senses in dreams, I should have just said "Man, dreams are fucked up."

That would have left a lot less room for contradiction.

Do you dream in smell?

Last night I had a dream where I ran into an old friend from high school. Actually, rather than calling him a “friend,” it would be more accurate to call him a “drug-dealing acquaintance.” It was in a restaurant kitchen. He was waiting tables and bringing back a load of dishes. I don’t know what I was doing there. 

He stopped, and we said “hey,” in the surprised way you say it to someone you haven’t seen in years. After only a couple seconds of pleasantries, he excitedly offered me some cocaine (man, he hadn’t changed a bit!). I hesitated, so he grabbed a bag of it out of his breast pocket and offered to let me smell it. In my dream world, evidently, smell is an adequate test of the quality of coke.

So I took a whiff, which inadvertently became a half-snort. It smelled exactly—exactly—the way I remember cocaine smelling: mediciney, with a touch of sweet spiciness to it. What’s weird about it is that I haven’t smelled that smell in almost seven years. But in my dream it was perfect.

I think it’s the first time I’ve smelled anything in a dream. I can’t say for sure I’ve never had a dream that wasn’t somehow informed by smell—like, “Hey, I smell smoke, so maybe I should try to find where the fire is!”—but I’m pretty sure this is the only one I’ve had where a smell took center stage. This whiff of cocaine was so striking and true to life that—obviously—I was thinking about it long after dream’s end. In fact, it even took me a while to realize that the sensation was only imagined. I woke up thinking about the smell of cocaine, and it was only after I got out of the early morning quasi-reality that I remembered I hadn’t actually snorted cocaine since I was 18. 

This got me thinking about which of our senses are present in dreams, and to what extent. I think most people would say their entire sensory selves are present in their dreams. I don’t think this is true, even though I’m only extrapolating from my own experience.

How many dreams have you had where you smelled something distinct? How many dreams have you had where you touched something and really noticed its texture? Or what about the more complicated parts of sight: patterns, optical illusions, light sources and shadows? How often are you aware of those things in your dreams? 

It’s common in conversations about dreaming to ask people if they dream in color or in black and white. I’ve always thought this was sort of a bogus question, derived from a mistaken analogizing of dreams and movies (If you asked someone from the pre-film era if he dreamed in black and white, he’d probably ask where you came up with such an absurd question.). Still, the question illustrates our basic uncertainty concerning what we actually sense in our dreams.

I think people ask the question in the first place because they’re unsure of their own answers. They want other people to help them decide. I’ve never really believed the people who claim to dream in black and white. It seem ridiculous that anyone’s dreams would conform to a convention of cinematography that existed for only 50 years. But I don’t doubt that these people see no color in their dreams. I think the explanation may be that they don’t really see anything at all. 

In some of my experiences with psychedelics, I felt that I wasn’t “seeing” the kaleidoscopic patterns unfolding behind my closed eyelids, but rather that I was just imagining them so intensely that it was pretty much the same thing as seeing them. I think something similar is going on in dreams. 

Everything we “sense” in dreams is, of course, just a product of imagination, and it’s only through our unconscious laziness that we convince ourselves that the sensory parts of our brains are actually being engaged. Only in rare, rare instances (for me, at least) are the senses involved in any way I can point to. It takes something as odd as a forgotten acquaintance pulling out some high-quality blow for my imagination to reach all the way to my olfactory nerves. 
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P.S. This essay doesn't really contradict my lucid dream one, because that lucid dream was a total anomaly.

The great mental build-up to nothing

Last week at work was one of the most stressful I’ve had in a long time. It was partly because I had just gotten back from ten days out of the office and had an enormous pile of emails to sort through (this being by far my busiest time of the year), but it was mostly because of a dispute I had with one of the volunteer conference chairs I work with.

The details of the dispute aren’t important. He wanted to do something unusual in his upcoming conference, I told him he couldn’t (for various legitimate reasons), he persisted, I told him “no” again, he went behind my back to complain to the event manager (because he’s a bit of a prick), many emails and phone calls flew back and forth.

The stressful part about it was that I wasn’t sure if the event manager would back me up. Some of the other event managers I work with I would trust to support me fully and tell the chair to fuck himself. But this one I wasn’t so sure about. I was just waiting for her to come to my desk and tell me to comply with the chair’s request just to make him happy. 

I was dreading that this might happen. I had already firmly told this guy “no” twice, so it would have been humiliating and undermining of my credibility to then go back to him and say “yes” after all. It would mean saying I was wrong, which—oh—I just hate.

This drama played out over a few days, and I began convincing from the beginning that this humiliation definitely would happen. I was certain that the event manager was going to force me to go back to this dude, hat in hand, apologize for saying “no,” and give him exactly what he wanted. The whole scenario continued to build in severity in my imagination until it became a matter of professional life or death.

I imagined in intricate detail how I was going to flat-out refuse the event manager’s instructions to say “yes” to this guy. I imagined how I was going to tell her everything I dislike about her style of micromanagement and about her meddling in my work which she doesn’t totally understand. I imagined I was going to say, “Fuck it—this is the last straw,” and just walk out of the building without ever looking back. 

I have a small piece of company property stored in my luggage at home since I need to bring it to all the conferences I attend. On Thursday, I brought it in to the office just in case I really did decide to cut all ties with the company right then and there.

Well, if you read the title of this essay you’ve probably already guessed that all this imagination—all this dread, all this planning of arguments, all this pre-emptive fuming on my part—came to nothing.The event manager supported me, we politely shot down the chair, and the week ended on a relaxed high note. Jesus.

What’s funny about it is that I had been telling myself the entire time that it was going to come to nothing. I would have brief moments of sanity where I said to myself, “No no, man, you always imagine these conflicts are going to play out worse than they actually do.” I must have told myself that no fewer than ten times. It’s the truth. I do always imagine the worst-case scenario in my personal disputes. But only a few minutes after telling myself this, I’d involuntarily slip right back into crafting rebuttals and insults.

So now the stress I put myself through for a few days seems utterly ridiculous. I wish I could say I’ve drawn from this the lesson that I should finally just relax and not daydream every minor disagreement into an argument of world-defining proportions. But the sad fact is that I’ve drawn that lesson before, and I know I always forget it. I think the real lesson I’ve drawn is that human beings are indeed, as others have said, fundamentally creatures of routine—endlessly repeating ourselves in our relationships with others. And even repeating ourselves in how we, when alone, conceive of those relationships. 

Am I always going to imagine myself as the beleaguered voice of reason needing to battle it out with those who just don’t understand? Well, probably. I’m pretty well used to imagining that by now.