“Whaddya mean $1.37?!” a wiry haired, bespectacled customer asked a sixteen-year-old, unindicted co-conspirator in the price-fixing conspiracy that the old man has dreamed up for a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. “It was $1.22, just last week.”
I know you’re angry sir, I think noting the veins protruding on the man’s nose, and the ruddy complexion, that seem indigenous to those that that have a favorite bar stool. And I know you’re dying to tell anyone who will listen (or is forced to listen) but Eddie, the red headed cashier, has a lot less say than you think in Target’s “outrageous” price scheme. And as much as you’d like to think your eyes are wide open on this issue, Target does not add anything to Eddie’s wage if he is able to add your fifteen cents to their profit margin. The trouble Eddie has counting back your change should provide enough evidence that Eddie is not involved in the determinations made on shipping and handling costs; the amount of state and federal taxes imposed on this product; or the mushroom-marketing cooperative’s decision on the costs the manufacturing. It’s also reasonable to suspect that the diatribe that you’ve obviously rehearsed in the mirror about the effect the improving economies in Latin America could have on the price of mushrooms, if their production of mushrooms proves to increase at the rate some project, will be lost on everyone involved once your transaction with Eddie is concluded.
You may believe that this face of Target, this sixteen-year-old, named Eddie, knows full well what’s going on, but one look at his blanker-than-usual expression should tell you all that you need to know. Unfortunately, you are an informed consumer, and you feel the need to give him your what for.
The sixteen-year-old can do nothing about it, however, and you will likely be considered what they call a moron for arguing with the sixteen-year-old in the first place.The sixteen-year-old will, likely, not care that you have this complaint, and he will likely forget all about your informed complaint the minute the transaction is complete. He’s not going to tell his boss, and his boss is not going to tell his boss, and there will be no boardroom discussion focusing on your complaint regarding the rising cost of a can of cream of mushroom soup. Move along!
Life is not random, some say, it is choreographed by a controlling force with a master plan that we may not understand at first, but will eventually come clear when we look back and see the final portrait. For others, life is a random series of moments, equivalent to an abstract pointillism painting. This belief suggests that we’re simply here one day, talking to our friends, gone the next. Human life has more meaning than the life of the badger in the arena of consciousness of life, but little more than that. The primary difference, for these people, comes from the act of looking at life, examining it with strained eyes, until we see a purpose that we believed was there all along. No matter how one looks at it, we can all agree that these moments of life are finite, and that it is an abuse to waste them. The latter becomes all the more clear when we’ve survived a death-defying incident.
An abstract pointillism painting
Part of the allure of the story of the vampire is the dream mere mortals have of being immortal, so that these moments of life can be infinite. These dreams only become more profound as we age, and the realization of our own mortality becomes more substantial –and the idea of eventually becoming inconsequential, even to those that love us most, haunts us– we dream of immortality. The dream of immortality is one thing, the non-fan have argued, but the actuality of it would be quite another.
The import of the allure of the vampire story is the question that fascinates us, “What would you do if you knew knew that you were going to live forever?” The less obvious question, asked by cynical viewers/readers of the story is, “Why would you do it?” How exciting would the bungee jump be to the person that knew there was no chance they were going to die? The primal fear of falling would surely affect some vampires, as they were all mortal once, but if you can’t even be superficially wounded, much less mortally, how much allure would there be in the “death plunge” of the bungee jump?
In most incarnations of the story, the vampire is not only immortal and invulnerable to superficial injury, they can even manipulate situations to a point where they wouldn’t have to experience emotional pain. Through the power of their eyes, most vampires can convince mere mortals to do their bidding. As a result, no girl can ever dump them; no bully can pick on them; and no moron can ever do anything to mess their life up. In most incarnations of the vampire story, the use of this power is selective, so as to allow the mortals involved in the story to do things that give the story greater drama, but the cynics in the audience wonder why the vampires don’t just turn on their eye power and persuade the girl to love them. (I know most vampire stories involve the vampire wanting organic love from the girl that results from the mortal deciding to love them, but the very idea that they can circumvent this process by turning on their eye power diminishes this to a tool used by the author of the story to provide drama.) We cynics understand that thread of the story that the greatness of love lies in its achievement for the vampire, but when he is utterly devastated by the failure to do so, the vampire doesn’t have to experience that devastation. The vampire has a plan B. The eyes. Just flick on that power.
Mere mortals have no idea if the girl is going to love us in real life, and we have no plan B if she doesn’t. We are pretty sure that we’re going to survive the bungee jump, and the roller coaster, as they offer some comfort of being a controlled environment, but there is some fear –that results in some adrenaline– involved in the idea that we’re not 100% positive. If you were 100% positive that you weren’t going to die, or even receive some painful superficial wounds, why would you do it? Would there be any sense of accomplishment in achieving love from another, if you knew that you had such a solid plan B that you could convince the girl to love you, regardless what she decides.
Some of us have had near death experiences, from a car crash that first responders informed us should’ve resulted in the end of our moments; we’ve been informed that if our death-defying incident had occurred inches to the left, or right, we would no longer be here to talk about it; and others have had incidents that require no such explanations of how close they’ve come. Those that have survived the latter speak of a sense of euphoria that overwhelms them and profoundly informs the rest of their life. This sense of euphoria, they say, does not last forever, or as long as it probably should, but for the short time you’re immersed in it, your second lease on life can be euphoric.
In an attempt to explain this blast of euphoria that comes from being unsuccessfully murdered, author of the collection of essays We Never Learn, Tim Kreider, uses the plot of Ray Bradbury’s The Lost City of Mars to illustrate: “A man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes –in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, and exploding rocket ships– until he emerges flayed of all his Christian guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.”
In the essay, Reprieve, Kreider explains that after it was deemed that he would survive the attempt on his life, he considered everything that followed as “Gravy.” A term he derives from a man, author Raymond Carver, that was also granted a second lease on life.
Quoting from the proverbial “food tastes better” template of survivors, Kreider states that he did things he wouldn’t have done in his pre-murder attempt life, and what was once deemed troubling, dramatic, and consequential in the first life, became trivial in the scope of having survived. Kreider claims he even developed a loud, racauos laugh, in his reprieve, that caused “People to look over to make sure I was not about to open up on them with a weapon.” He claims that laughter could be heard when he complained to a friend, “You don’t understand me.”
The friend responded: “No, sir, I understand you very well –it is you who do not understand yourself.”
Whereas most survivors perceive divine intervention in their narrow escape, Kreider states that even in the midst of his euphoria, that “Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life For Some Purpose. I was not blessed or chosen, but lucky.”
I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. It’s a truism,” he basically states, that motivates most thrill-seeking adventurers to attempt what are basically “suicide attempts with safety nets”. “The trick,” he writes, “Is to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent, Clouseauque (Inspector Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers, in the movie The Pink Panther) hit man to assassinate you.
“It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes.” Kreider writes of his terminally ill father, writing that while in his last days: “(The man) cared less about things that didn’t matter and more about the things that did. It was during his illness that he gave me the talk that all my artist friends have envied, in which he told me that he and my mother believed in my talent and I shouldn’t worry about getting “some dumb job.””
But, Kreider writes: “You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.”
The latter quote reminds one of a guest on The Tonight Show in which this guest talked about a love that spanned decades. She claimed that her husband provided her a white rose every day, and that the two of them never fought. In the aftermath of that interview, host Johnny Carson turned to his sidekick Ed McMahon and said something along the lines of: “It’s a beautiful story, and I wish I had the same (Carson was married four times), but I can’t help but thinking how boring it would be to never fight for that many years. I’m not calling her a liar. I believe her. I just think it would be boring.”
In great loves, and great lives, life can experience great highs and great lows, but the great highs cannot be fully appreciated without the contrast of great lows.
I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best,” Kreider writes, “Crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. It’s easy now to dismiss that year (following the survival of the unsuccessful murder) as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d feel after getting clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor. It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.”
We all love to quote Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It’s important to prepare for things to go wrong, of course, but is it a truism that everything will go wrong, or is it a “maddening perversity of human psychology” that we only notice things when they do? If the petty jurisdiction of local weather provides us with clear and 60, how long will we remember that versus -2 and 10 inches of snow? And how beautiful is clear and 60 when all we’ve known, all week, is -2 and 10 inches? How beautiful, conversely, would clear and 60 be if we could use the eye power of the vampire to have clear and 60, 365? The dream would be one thing, the reality quite another.
“Why do people kiss?” my nephew asked his dad when he was younger.
My brother called his wife into the room. “I think this question is more in your level of expertise.”
“Because that’s their way of saying I love you,” his mother answered.
“Why don’t they just say it then?” he asked. “Why do they have to kiss?”
Questions like these have been asked by curious adolescents of giggling parents for as long as children and parents have been interacting. The reason that we parents might experience some hesitation when trying to answer questions like these is that it’s been so long since we didn’t know the answer that we don’t know how to answer the question. We’ve also taken things like kissing for granted for so long, and that it’s been such a staple in the process for so long, that we stepped back to ask “Why?” for a long time.
Most parents probably dismiss the peck as the source of their child’s inquiry, and focus their search for an answer on the saliva sharing smooch. Most of us probably assume that our child has already accepted the “Hello” and “Goodbye” peck as a fundamental part of the process of greeting and parting with our loved ones, and that the nature of the child’s curiosity regards why a man would want to trade saliva with a woman, in a city park, to express love, and why the two of them would enjoy that elongated transfer of fluids so much that they would want to do it more often?
“One hypothesis,” posed by Noam Shpancer, of Psychology Today, “is that (the sloppy smooch) might be a mechanism for gathering information about a potential partner. A kiss brings you in close –close enough to smell and taste [the] chemicals that carry immunological information. Our saliva carries hormonal messages: Close contact with a person’s breath, lips, and teeth informs us about his or her health and hygiene– and thus potential as a mate. Research also suggests a range of other functions, such as expressing and reinforcing feelings of trust and intimacy and facilitating sexual intercourse. The meaning of a kiss depends on who’s doing the kissing.”
My sister-in-law started out saying, “A kiss is a way two people express love.”
“Why don’t they just say it then?” my nephew repeated. The two of them went back and forth for a bit, as his mother offered what he considered subpar answers, and he pressed her further. She would later confess that when he hit her with this question, it was so out-of-the-blue that she needed some time to think.
“A woman learns a lot from a kiss,” she said. “A quality kiss shows a woman that you’re paying attention and that your affection for her is real. If it’s not she’ll know. Some of the times a kiss is just a kiss, but some of the times it means something, and a woman will know the difference.”
My nephew was not of the age to understand the term “end game”, but I’m guessing that that was the crux of his follow up question, “Why don’t they just say it then? Why do they have to kiss?” Why doesn’t a guy just walk up to the woman in the park and say, “I love you,” and walk away when he’s determined that she knows he’s being genuine?
I’m sure that his mother would then say something along the lines of, “Because saying ‘I love you’ can be easily faked, and a girl needs to know that you love her, and physically showing her, with a meaningful kiss, proves it to her. A woman can feel your intentions.” This basically goes to the chemistry, and the Chemistry that Shpancer described, in a woman knowing and knowing in her conscious and subconscious determinations, but that would’ve been way over my nephew’s head, and it would’ve only led to more questions about the abstracts of need, emotion, and fulfillment that he was too young to understand.
My nephew is male, of course, and reading the Psychology Today findings in the Evolutionary Psychology piece, he might never understand when a kiss is just a kiss on the level that those of the female gender do. For to a male, a kiss is rarely as important as it is to a female. If he thinks he’s going to provide an answer, he will pursue it. He will want to kiss a girl his age, and he will be confused when it’s over and it doesn’t achieve clarity for her, but he will continue to kiss girls, because he knows it means something to them. When he has ulterior motives, he might try to add bits of information to a kiss, but if his recipient has as much omniscience as his mom and Noam Shpancer theorize, the recipient will know when such additions are false. When he genuinely likes a girl, and those additional ingredients he adds are more organic, he might wonder what the difference was. My advice, if my nephew ever asks me for advice, is do not think, just do. As Olivia Newton-John sang in Grease, “Feel your way.”
In their findings, the Evolutionary Psychology poll states that 86% of women polled would not have sex with someone without kissing them first; while only 47% of males say they would not. Their takeaway was that:
“For women, the smell and taste of their kissing partner weighs heavily in their decision to pursue closer contact. Men routinely expect that kissing will lead to intercourse and tend to characterize “a good kiss” as one leading to sex.”
The next poll probably gets to the heart of my nephew’s follow up question better, as it asks the genders how important kissing is. In a 2013 poll listed in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, there is the suggestion that kissing may never be as important to my nephew as the girls he’s kissing, as men rank the importance of kissing as a 3.8, on a scale of one to five, while women rank it as a 4.2. Their takeaway was that:
“Women rank kissing as more important in all kinds of romantic relationships than men do; men also tend to consider it less important as relationships go on.”
***
The perfect illustration of the minutiae involved in a kiss comes from (where else?) the television sitcom Seinfeld. In an episode entitled The Face Painter, the character David Puddy informs the character Elaine Benes, that he will no longer “Support the team” by painting his face before the two of them attend a hockey match, because Elaine it embarrasses her when he does it. She is visibly touched by the idea that Puddy would alter his life in such a manner just for her, and to celebrate this new understanding in their relationship Puddy says:
“Ah, c’mere,” as he nears her for a kiss. “All right,” he says when that celebratory kiss is concluded, and he’s up and moving towards the door, “I gotta go home and get changed before the game. I’ll be back, we’ll make out.”
This scene is brilliant on so many comedic levels, not the least of which is the depiction of the value each gender places on kissing. Puddy acknowledges that some sort of romantic punctuation is needed for the agreement they’ve reached, and he basically says, “All right. Here!” to initiate that kiss. The comedic value of the situation occurs when this romantic punctuation concludes, and Puddy simply says “All right” as if to say ‘now that that’s over, I need to get some other things done.’ The very human element of “Enjoying that transfer of fluids so much that he wants to do more often” is then dispelled by Puddy saying once he’s done doing those other things (changing clothes), they can start doing something else (making out). He thereby places the value of making a seemingly transformative change of his life (no more face painting) on a level with the act of changing his clothes, and the excessive kissing involved in making out. This is all punctuated with Puddy unceremoniously suggesting that he’ll do what she wants when he’s done, but that he’s only doing it for her.
The subtext of this exchange surprises the once visibly touched Elaine for she thought she had a read on the situation. “You’d do that for me?” she asked when Puddy announced that he would no longer be painting his face. She believed they achieved a new understanding in their relationship, and she was so touched that he would make such a transformation that before he announced his plans after the celebratory kiss, she was breathlessly holding her hand to her heart. She also appeared on the verge of tears believing that her otherwise unsentimental boyfriend would be making such a life-altering sacrifice for her by sealing it with a kiss. She appeared to believe that this sacrifice, and that kiss, suggested a brighter future, and a better understanding, between the two of them as a couple. When Puddy stands and says what he says, it dispels all of the conclusions Elaine derived from the situation, and the idea that a “woman always knows”. And her only takeaway, as the scene closes, could be that Puddy, like most stereotypical jarheads, will go through the motions to please a woman, but it actually means little-to-nothing to them.
Most boys spend their adolescence believing that their mother knows all, until they find out she doesn’t, but they continue to do the things necessary to please her, and fortify this shared illusion, until most boys become better men for it. Some boys put their heart into it, and live their lives, and kiss their girlfriends with the belief that their mothers know all, and how they treat their mother will be an indicator for how they will go on to treat all women. Others, like the fictional character Puddy, go through the motions to make the women in their lives happy, but to them a kiss is much lower than a 3.8 on a scale of one to five.
After telling me this story, my sister-in-law asked me if I wanted to take a crack at answering my nephew’s questions, and I informed her that it’s probably better that I don’t. It’s probably better that he run the optimistic and loving road her answers put him on. He’ll likely become a better man by trying to prove to all the women in his life that he can be meaningful and moving when he wants to be, and when that time comes for him to plant that profoundly spiritual kiss on that one, special woman, he’ll do it with the belief that he can make her believe it too. And, he’ll hopefully get all that done before he falls prey to the cynical notion that some of the times a kiss is just a kiss to get women to shut up about wanting to kiss all the time.
You may believe that this face of Target, this sixteen-year-old, named Eddie, knows full well what’s going on, but one look at his blanker-than-usual expression should tell you all that you need to know. Unfortunately, you are an informed consumer, and you feel the need to give him your what for.
Rilaly 