Fruit Inspector Number 2434356...I need a word with you....

Those little labels on your fruit are really maddening and they leave a greasy stain on the tomatoes and probably someone's DNA.



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Good News Told Badly

In my lifetime goal of raising dilettantism to new heights, I have finally succumbed to the temptation to blog. It is therefore inevitable that I fall into the traps well-known to others who have preceded me down this mist-enshrouded trail. I will either take myself too seriously, or not seriously enough.

So let me right away make the first mistake, which is one of seeing oneself as a political and social critic. I see that Nora Jones, singer-songwriter, has joined the list of celebrities who consider it “de rigeur” to speak out about “this government” and its activities. Whoop-de-do!

Norah’s from Texas and she’s got a new album called “Too Late” or something like that. Norah sings nicely and it amazes me how a good voice can dress up trite lyrics. The San Jose Mercury News quotes some lyrics from the new album:

“But fear's the only thing I saw/ And three days later it was clear to all/ That nothing is as scary as election day." Then: "Who knows? Maybe the plans will change/ Who knows? Maybe he's not deranged."
That’s evaporative, isn’t it? Ready for another one?
"In a boat that's built of sticks and hay/ We drifted from the shore/ With a captain who's too proud to say/ That he dropped the oar."
Gosh, where does such creativity come from? Just think of that analogy—a captain, a ship, and a dropped oar! Get it? Oh well, maybe the plans will change” and we will send folk singers and boring lyricists to pull people out of the next WTC disaster.
Back on the East Coast, there’s more drama with New Jersey Governor Corzine who lives life in the fast lane. That’s okay with me, but not if I’m driving on New Jersey highways while he’s barreling down the pick at 91 mph in his giant Suburban SUV. It’s kind of irritating the way Corzine’s people (and the police) came out with the “red pickup truck” story which allegedly caused the governor’s driver to head into a concrete wall. Did everyone buy the story hook, line, and sinker? Well, NJ’s a great place to fish, I’ll admit that.
But now Corzine’s ex-gf, some sort of big-time Communications Workers Union Leader, is on the front page of the New York Post telling about their love affair while they were both married (not to each other). It’s okay…. I’m not going into a bedroom morality play here but to depict that woman as some kind of hot number is a stretch of the imagination unless power makes you hot. I guess it was power made both of them hot for each other. Power and sex….I’m not sure I’d be able to resist the combination myself. But I’d like to try.
Money is the third thing. Sex, Money, Power. Money is what the feds found in Louisiana Congressman Jefferson’s refrigerator during the Katrina hurricane. About 90G in bribes, it is reported. The feds certainly took their time about that, especially when the money was handed over to Jefferson by an FBI sting operator. I suppose government prosecutors were too busy with the Scooter Libby case. There’s another of society’s dangers removed for 30 months. We can all sleep peacefully at night since the perpetrator of whatever dastardly crime he was supposed to have committed was given hard time.
I was looking for some good news and I found it in the New York Times. The good news is that there’s plant in Minnesota that processes turkey droppings into organic fertilizer. No, wait! there’s bad news in the second paragraph. It seems the environmentalists are bugging out about that, too. The plant uses electricity. But hell, the only thing that runs on vapors is Hilary Clinton.
To tell the truth, I’m not a Hilary Hater. I even like Hilary Clinton and think she would be a great mayor of New York City (especially Manhattan). Better than Bloomberg but not as good as Giuliani was. But still pretty good. Manhattan’s predatory liberal elite would find her irresistible. Hilary’s bright, communicates well, and has a quality of strength which is the stuff of country music. Had she spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp with broken bones and torture, I’d seriously consider her for commander-in-chief.
With me it’s either drought or hurricane wet. I’m well on my way to being another self-important boring blogster with this post. I should call this the “Maybe Blog”. Maybe I will have an international reporter come on board. I think it’s important to have a reporter from those largely unknown regions of the earth. I’m thinking of getting someone from Bulgaria. Bulgaria, that’s right. If that’s not proof enough of my sophistication….
Peace out…..
Moeursalen

Psychology Now and Then

The professor raps on the lectern with a pencil, very sharply, impatient to engage us.

       “What is psychology?”

         He says it two times, the rhetorical couplet. Everyone knows he wants a definition but everyone knows that the person who answers a rhetorical question is something of a putz. We all know what psychology is, especially me. I’ve been studying for the National Counselor’s exam for three months. I ponder the word: psychology. I ‘break it down’ into ‘psycho’, and ‘logy’. The first part of the word has me wondering about that skinny guy across the room who sits blinking his eyes and sneering contemptuously about him with his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his head cocked to the hard left. I wonder if he’s daydreaming about slitting someone’s throat one of these days, or suicide by cop, or running his car head-on into another as he drives at max speed on the Long Island Expressway in the wrong direction. The second part of the word: ‘logy’. That’s a much more agreeable thought. Sounds like ‘lounging’. I’m thinking of getting ‘logy’. Getting ‘logy’ might apply to lounging around with that hot chick who sits near the other hot chick just two rows behind where I can’t enjoy the vision of either.

     “What is psychology?”

       I feel like telling him straight out what it is. Now that I’m a psychology major, I’ve figured it out that my entire family is completely nuts, and that yours is, too. I’ve had a gestalt, so to speak. The term is used in psychology to mean a flash of sudden insight. I’ve also got it figured that all future generations will also be completely whacked since we’re shot from the same gene pool. Another gestalt. A gene pool is like a humongous shotgun shell with an unlimited spread pattern and just about guarantees there will always be jobs for people like us and for Mr. What-Is-Psychology up there with his face stamped by generations of benign though questionable claims of knowledge.

I think I shall enjoy being a counselor. I have a great deal of experience already, having passed through numerous crises of identity. It will be a simple matter of being paid for something that comes to me naturally. As I look about myself, in class and outside of it, I can see I’m not alone. In neighborhood, community, country, class, subway, factory, school, gym, boardroom, restaurants and newspaper pages, I can see that identity is the most elusive and yet most desired commodity to obtain. Everyone’s struggling for identity yet noone seems to find it except for lucky souls like Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton who make the pages of the National Star.

          To no avail, I checked the big board at the NYSE to see if there were anyone engaged in the trade of identity futures. No doubt that was a prohibited practice of the National Association of Securities Dealers. But that is another area—security—and the role of a counselor specialist is to create the elusion of that while maintaining the best kept secret of The Counseling Life, which is that there is none. Why spend so much time upon self-improvement when one’s life could be lost in a nanosecond?

     ‘Is being a mother an identity?’ someone asked recently in class. Well…yes and no, I thought to myself, faithful to the creed of medico-psychological science in hedging one’s bets with regard to human pathology. Being a mother was indeed an identity! The professor enlightened us with addenda. But at the same time, he exclaimed, a mother is a person with special and individual needs.

      A gestalt popped immediately into my head. A mother can be something other than a person who gives birth and nurtures. A mother is also the sum total of all those activities which are so common as to be memorialized in television commercials selling everything from libido stimulants to cutlery. Is there something Freudian in that last line? I can’t say for sure because the one essential thing I’ve learned from my class is how to block horrific or embarrassing thoughts from entering my head. No, I’ve set my compass toward the following objectives, according to Adler’s theories of paradox:

       Communication Skills: I am a wordsmith, accustomed to expressing my every nuance in synonyms accompanied by frantic hand gestures, but I wonder if there’s any significance in the fact that I work three hours a day and four days a week at a boxing gym. Is a booming left-hook to the rib cage a kind of gestalt?

Self-Actualization: That’s Maslow’s highest point of existence in his order of hierarchies. Men, guess where physical needs are, according to Mazlow. On the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchies! Consider that Mazlow’s own path to self-actualization included marrying his first cousin, Bertha Goodman.

Good Behavior: Notice I say ‘good’ behavior without defining what that is in order to obtain your agreement. We all know what good behavior is, don’t we? Yes. Yes, we do! What we know as good behavior will continue to be good behavior so long as we never discuss exactly what it is. Adler’s paradoxical theories emphasize exaggeration of a behavior in order to provide insight into it and possible change. Did Adler have the right ‘gestalt’ there?

That’s it in a nutshell, the heart of my counseling theories. But I have to tell you that I admire the Behaviorists a great deal, too. Admiration does not necessarily mean emulation, mind you. But Pavlov and Skinner predated Madison Avenue by fifty years. That dogs could be conditioned to salivate at the tinkling of a bell even without physical reward or punishment is remarkably prescient since it took modern social scientists fifty more years to discover that men can be conditioned to salivate at the sound of high heels on the catwalk floor at a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, even before the models take the stage.

     But hey...there’s the bell. Class is over. I’m back to reality therapy. That’s a concept pioneered by a psychologist named William Glasser. Glasser rejected Freudian techniques and preferred his patients to focus on the ‘here and now’. He developed the 3 Rs of reality behavior: Right, Responsibility, and Reality. For those of you who think that William Glasser’s dictums are not sufficiently profound, I would point you to one of Glasser’s many book volumes: WARNING: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health, 2004 ISBN 0-06-053866-X