A Day in the Life Of Fakename

This day would be Friday, April 25th, 2014. Nothing special about this day, other than I happened to inhabit it.
First, I made my first ever trip to Whole Foods, because 1) it was the only grocery store between the hair salon where I got my hair cut and my workplace, and 2) I was having a food emergency, namely, I was starving. Had I not been in such a rush, I could do a whole Grocery Voyeurism post on the customers of this establishment, and I may have to go back, just in order to do a more detailed job of reporting. At a glance, I can say that the customers were of the Birkenstock-wearing, cloth bag-carrying variety. It isn’t nice to make fun of people, but some people just lend themselves too well to stereotyping, so I can’t help myself.
I also made a flying trip to the library on this day, since besides having a food emergency, I had a book emergency (didn’t have one). When I arrived, there was a guy standing at the ground level elevator. This elevator only goes up one level, and is there mostly to accommodate the handicapped. Because our library has delusions of grandeur and thinks it’s the U.S. Supreme Court. There are a gazillion steps leading to the entrance, which I think are supposed to remind you of the power and majesty within. So I take the elevator too.
About the time I arrived at the elevator, the guy standing there started to walk away. I said, “Isn’t it working?” And he replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know how to operate it”. This was like an immediate stab to the heart for me. I said, “Here, you only have to push this button”. Inside the elevator, he told me I’d come along at just the right time, and didn’t it look like it was going to rain? And lest you think badly of this guy, I realized later this was not one simple push button. It was an entire panel with another button to call for assistance, and another area for firefighter operation which you usually only see inside an elevator. And the button to actually call the elevator was not labeled.
I seem to have some sort of karma involving the library elevators. Once I was there and a woman got trapped and was screaming hysterically. Once she was freed, my flying trip was delayed by about 20 minutes while I sat at a table with her and pretty much cooed and talked nonsense, and said things like “You’re going to be okay”. I knew she was okay when she pulled out her cell phone and asked someone to come and get her. Good idea. No way was she driving.
At the end of my day, I had a truck towed from a parking space, because it was blocking the car next to it. In case you too ever manage parking, when you have a vehicle towed, the customer does not call you up and say, “Thank you so much for towing my vehicle. I now see that I behaved badly and I’ve learned my lesson.” Especially not at 4:00 P.M. on a Friday afternoon.
After making a couple of other feeble excuses, the guy finally said that he was there first. This made it a physics problem. I asked if he could explain to me how the customer he blocked managed to wedge herself in beside him so as to block herself?
Then I came home, read my book at the picnic table, drank some wine, played with the dog and the kitten, and watched the birds. The End.

How Your Brain Works

Frankly, I don’t know how your brain works, nor do you.  I don’t know how my brain works either (assuming it does).  And the bad news–or the good news, depending on how you look at it–is that no one else does either.  Bad news if you’re trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s; good news if you get a little queasy about telepathy and “mind-control” stuff.  Not that mind-c0ntrol (behavioral conditioning) can’t be accomplished without actually knowing how it works inside the brain. 

I think a little mystery is a good thing. While there is a certain loneliness inherent in the human condition, expressed in the simple saying, “You can never really know another person”, if you could, would you?  I personally am not ready to be Borg…but I digress.

Today we will discuss two important concepts relative to brain function:  phobias, and chocolate cake. 

First let us define phobia:  it’s something YOU are scared of.  If I’m scared of something, it’s an endearing quirk.  If you’re scared of something, you’re irrational.  Let’s take two examples. 

First ailurophobia, or fear of cats.  Fakename has never understood this, but she has a theory as to why it might develop.  Cats apparently don’t have the facial muscles to be particularly expressive.  They can move their ears, and open and close their mouths (very useful for eating), and they can twitch their noses, but the eyes are the problem.  They don’t blink often, and so appear to be staring, which we humans interpret as aggression.  Not to mention all the times they’ve sucked the breath out of our sleeping babies. 

Second, gephyrophobia, fear of bridges.  This is not as uncommon as you might think.  Let’s pause for a moment to say that an anxiety doesn’t reach the level of phobia unless it affects your behavior.  Such as–I will never again travel from Tallahassee to Jacksonville without going however many miles out of the way I have to go to reach it from the south.  Never again will I do that I-10, I-95 Junction thing with the elevated roadways.  But mostly, it’s bridges over water that are scary. 

This is a relatively new development for me, because I have driven over some monster bridges.  The Lake Ponchartrain Causeway.  Not to mention the Huey P. Long bridge.  The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.  The Confederation Bridge between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in Canada–actually, I was a passenger for that one, but still.  However, nothing compares bridge-wise to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay.  I date my personal bridge phobia to having to cross it.  I had never experienced anything like it. 

It’s described as “one of the world’s longest bridges with a cable-stayed main span”.   The cables are painted yellow, and here’s the deal:  when you hit the section of road where the cables are, it sets up a sort of optical illusion which is disorienting.  Behold: 

Curiously, Fakesister shares this fear of bridges.  Last year she took a trip to northern California and we had some discussion about how and if she would make it over the Golden Gate.  Somewhere out there is a scientist who would like to study us. 

Finally, some scientists did an experiment that went like this:  A group of people were asked to memorize either two-digit numbers or seven-digit numbers, then all they had to do was walk down the hall, go into another room, and repeat the numbers.  But they were interrupted by being asked to choose a snack:  a refreshing bowl of healthy fruit, or chocolate cake.  It turns out that the people who had to remember seven digits were twice as likely to choose the chocolate cake.  This proves, or suggests…something or the other.  There was no word on whether either group remembered their numbers.  You can see the story, which aired on NPR,  here.