Hah!

What Are Ya Anyway?

Now, I've just come to terms (not entirely) with the fact that I am a body.

I wrote about how helpful it is to realize human beings can be understood this way: As crazy monkeys.

When you realize that human beings are crazy monkeys, a lot of things that don't make sense make a whole lot more sense.

The way they make sense is that you suddenly realize they aren't supposed to make sense. Our freaky behavior is just primate behavior and trying to explain the crazy shit people do is a lost cause. When you look at monkeys, do you try to explain what they do by considering what their reasons are? Most of the time, the best reason are: They are monkeys and what they do, they do because they are monkeys. Their monkey needs determine what they do.

I'm sure some scientists would not approve.

With humans, just add: They are crazy. Christmas shopping can even be explained by this theory. It's not all that different from grooming. They groom, we gift.

See how easy that is?

Anyway, breaking it all down to some kind of primitive level of explanation makes it so much easier (for me).

Monkeys kiss, right? I ask this because the other day we were in the kitchen cooking and I was kissing my husband in a place that is easy to reach--his neck. A friend of ours came in the room and she commented on this and I realized that it seemed like I was kissing my husband in a passionate way. But it wasn't passionate. I am always kissing my husband and in this case, it was because I thought he would be annoyed at me. But then, when I started kissing him I couldn't stop because it was so soothing.

It's not that kissing him is never passion-inducing but a lot of time I realize I kiss him because kissing him is basically like valium. Hugging my daughter is similar.

When I hug my daughter after a long day, it is like a drink of water in the desert. My brain waves probably alter, my blood pressure probably goes down. If I spend lots and lots of time with her I become bizarrely calm. And she does as well. The less work I have to do, the more time I spend with her, the more placid and happy she becomes. As do I. We have some kind of almost physical need to be with one another as much as possible.

This is so obvious. If we remember we are supposed to be in little bands of primates and not in our offices working until 5 a.m., it all makes sense.

With my husband, I was doing conflict avoidance kissing. Just like a monkey.

I get freaked out, in my body not just in my mind. Physical contact with them has this strange calming effect that I feel immediately, like a glass of bourbon.

This also happens with what I eat. If I eat certain foods, I become sort of bipolar. Maybe I am bipolar. Certain doctors have hypothesized this. But if I do not eat these foods, I stay sort of my usual crazy self, which I manage relatively well simply by kissing my husband and going to the gym.  Except in the winter and when I'm taking the crazy fertility treatments.

Damn, that sounds crazy.

Just take my word for this: I had an actual point here.

 

This Is Why I'm Not Poet Laureate Maybe?

So Kay Ryan, new poet laureate was on NPR reading a poem that I think was called "Imaginary Eskimo."

I can't find it anywhere online.

She said, I think, because I was barely listening, that it was about the fact that everyone thinks everyone else's life is easier than ours.

I have an imaginary version of the imaginary eskimo poem where I suppose we imagine the lives of people in simpler places and times and their connectedness, their struggle for survival as somehow ennobling while our struggle to pay off our credit cards is shameful. Our life is failure, inexcusable failure. A famine, a drought, having to live on an iceberg. That's not shameful because the imaginary Eskimo are pitted against the elements, impossible odds. If they survive, they are lucky or amazing and if they don't, who can blame them?

We, we are responsible for everything and can only hang our heads if it doesn't work out. Hang our heads and not die. Rather than marvel at our inexplicable luck with all that food in the refrigerator. Our sorrow is something we must hide.

Or maybe it is: The imaginary Eskimo just gets to be. The imaginary Eskimo knows where to go, what to do, doesn't have to think so much. There's no second guessing  yourself when you are an Eskimo, no regrets.

It is our options that are our burden.

That is my imaginary vision of her poem.

Here are some of Kay Ryan's real poems

There is this committee I am on and, as usual, in a social venue with other people that demands skill I am often ashamed, almost of my very existence. I dwell on my inability to do anything right, to be right, I revisit my desire not to exist or rather I'm sitting in a little vaporous cloud of myself and my consciousness, my burdensome consciousness.

So there is a woman, a very chipper, perky sort of woman with a lot of confidence and spunk who is also on this committee and is also sort of a lowly member as I am myself. I know she has a bipolar child. I've never asked her about it but one of my in-laws was a bipolar child and is still bipolar and there was an issue that came up on the committee about studies on very young bipolar children. I wondered how early her child displayed symptoms, so I asked her this. And she told me about her life and how not only is her child bipolar but her other children also have great difficulties. I realized that this woman, with her big rings and her stay at home life in her prosperous suburb really did have it hard. It is hard for her. She's just getting from day to day with her children. They go to summer camps my kid could never afford but I'd allowed myself to be distracted by this to imagine somehow that kind of thing must insulate her from life. She is just another human, another struggling human. She was another Imaginary Eskimo, I guess. You forget, the other people, they are just as real as you.

I've tried not to forget that everyone is in the midst, struggling and I wonder why I do. I think I've a bit of compassion fatigue. From getting older, from being such a quivering blob of empathy, year after year.  My family suffers so much, some of them, my aunts, my mother, my sisters at times. I try sometimes to coat myself in a bit of resentment about this, just to be able to stand it. When I look at it clear, without the begrudging annoyance, it's an ocean of sorrow.

I thought about this reading Alice's post.

Alice is sad.

I don't even know Alice but what struck me was that she mentioned how she hid it. She said "I do an excellent job of hiding in plain sight," So do so many of us. Or maybe we don't even have to hide because no one is particularly interested. Maybe we could be? Maybe we should be? And of course, maybe some us just can't.

We are all in it together. We are all completely alone. But a little in it together, without even realizing it.

Newton's Fourth Law of Balloons

Recent conversation with four year old in car on the way home from school.

Me: Oh, I forgot to give you the balloon we got yesterday when you fell asleep in the restaurant! (Gives balloon)

Her: What is it? A dog?

Me: Yes. I think so. Don't forget that balloons pop.

(OK, what a fucked up thing to say, you might be thinking. This is because I fear her pain or disappointment. I am not evil, I swear. My way of handling life, as I mentioned before, is to assume the worst and then try to tell myself 'OK, I must prepare myself. I must be ready to tolerate the worst.' NOT a good strategy as a parent. I do this because I think that if she, like me, learns to accept (read: obsessively dwell) on the inevitability of pain and disappointment, it won't be so painful or disappointing. I forget that this never works. Also, don't do this because your life will suck most of the time.)

If you want to understand my view on things, contemplate these two photos of Brigette Bardot.

Her: My balloon is going to POP? It's going to pop? Sobbing begins. Why? Oh why do balloons pop? I love this balloon. I love him. Why does he have to pop?

Me: It's the laws of physics. It's OK! It's really OK! Some things are more beautiful and we love them more because we only have them a short time. So we have to enjoy them when they are with us. And it doesn't hurt. It's a balloon. Balloons are supposed to last a short time. This is why they are special...etc.

Her: What is the law of physics?

Me: Yes! (I pick up an orange, desperate for some distraction.) If I drop this, what happens? It falls! So that's the law of gravity.

Her: There's a law of balloons?

Later....she brings up the fact that she doesn't want to grow up because then she will get old. And old people die. She recently lost a grandparent. However, if I ever had doubts that one could download one's own twisted issues with human life directly into one's child, I think these doubts have been recently dispelled. To me, life is a tragic thing full of transience and loss. I'm setting my kid up to be a Buddhist or an existentialist. I guess it could be worse. But this is also just the beginning.

So, you be the judge! Am I the worst parent ever in the history of parents? Should I have had kids? Yes or no?

Eventually Old Perhaps, Egoless, Wise, Crotchety?

Old thought: I hang out in cafes. With many youngsters and some oldsters. Glamorous oldsters don't hang out in cafes. The glamorous elderly do not. More like the homeless or semi-homeless elderly.

I'd be exaggerating a bit if I called myself elderly.

However, I noticed something today. Quite a lot of the music gets a response from cafe patrons but I do not know this music. I do not have any idea who made it. Also, some of the music sounds very alike to me. Whiny whiteboy music, I sometimes call it. Of course, hiphop I would not get neither. So it's not because it is whiteboy that I don't know it.

I used to be somewhat knowledgeable about alternative music a billion years ago but was too much of a snob to know much about pop music ever. I don't even know what this music counts as. Yes, I have the thought: This music is not as good as the music I once loved.

However, I frequent an even hipper cafe, where the staff is twice as mean (as is required in such places). Often, they play the music of my youth. And, disturbingly, I sometimes no longer remember what obscure band created that music. I recognized Savage  Republic. That is some old music. But what was that? The Residents? What about all those other songs that I think I listened to fifty times a billion years ago but now can't even remember. Although I had the record probably? I don't know. I DON'T KNOW.

Oldness. I want to tell young people that it is not as bad as you might think. Why? Because of the denial. Even in the mirror, you do not see your old self but your young self. In pictures, though, you might see your older self but you can always delete those or blame it on lighting. It would only matter that you got older if there were something you could not do that you desperately wanted to do and couldn't do as an older person. However, I want to tell the youth, do not worry: You will be too preoccupied with  your mistakes and failures to even worry about this! You won't even be able to think about what you wish you could do that you can't do. For one thing, you will often be consumed with dread and concern for your future prospects. Just like you are now! It's not that different, youth and middle adulthood.

So it's not bad at all, this getting older thing. Do not fear, younger people.

I've always liked fairly old people. That is, people a lot older than I am now. I like the elderly. I do think the elderly sometimes have wisdom. They often seem more egoless in certain ways. However, being a non-egoless elderly seems sort of shameful to me. That is, getting old but still being the same self-centered person preoccupied with the same trivialities--because what's the point then? This motivates me to work on this egolessness thing. Of course, egoless is more admirable when you've actually accomplished something and I'm not sure I expect to.

Even when I was as young as 19, I envied the old, partly because anticipating the future is the biggest hassle and I'd love to be done with some of that shit already and partly because they sometimes they have a level of detachment and resignation that borders on great wisdom if it is not great wisdom. On the other hand, some people who are old continue to be as full of shit as they were when they were young. You never know if you are going to end up like one of those. I'm currently in the process of trying to avoid that now.

For an idea of what to shoot for, watch the reaction of Doris Lessing when she wins the Nobel Prize.

Her attitude is, basically: Who gives a fuck?

Apparently, in the end, the prize did mess with her head. She says it was a "bloody disaster" for her writing.

I suppose one has to get to the point of being great to not care so much when everyone says you are great. But surely, there are more modest forms of this egolessness to go for.  I will tailor my version to failure, just in case.

I once heard an interview with Lessing. What struck me was that she was so preoccupied with her childhood and so interested in how she experienced the world as a child that she kept the kind of fascination with the world a child has. This is also something very compelling about some older people.

How you manage it, I'm not sure. I have no idea how to get the egoless thing either. It does not amount to a disinterest in oneself, though. Perhaps I only say that because of my attachment to my own self-absorption. I want to be egoless and still preoccupied with myself.

Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about here? No one wants to talk about getting old, do they? Or is this just another one of my favorite subjects, along with evil and death, that the internet and the rest of humanity tries to avoid?

Making No Sense

Google just makes me crazy with their seductive power of arranging everything in semi-coherent categories. I went crazy for googlewhacking for a month or two.

Googlewhacking  requires you to take two words and google them. When you find one and one site only with those two words you win, so long as the site isn't an index or a list. It has to have some sort of text.

I wasn't bad at googlewhacking and made some rules to make it more challenging--it had to be some sort of recognizable phrase--adjective noun; command; noun adverb.

I find strange things through this method. And nice things Such as this charmingly bombastic Edwin Arlington Robinson poem. Found that one when trying 'foretaste buzzcuts.' 

Bombast needs to make a comeback.

By the way, buzzcuts yarmulkes yields no google results so I hearby create one for it and now I can googlewhack myself.

Googlewhacking is the most dada-ish way of browsing the internet and if you still find yourself infatuated at the things under the rocks you turn over in here (on here? through here? from here? It all works) then you might get the same kind of pleasure. But hey, I get excited finding old bottlecaps in the desert.

Sometimes you find things you might have discovered in another way such as slashfood.

I've found everything from creepy white supremicist sites to Medical Muse: A Literary Journal Devoted to the Insights, Experiences and Meditations of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Community.

Google images are worse even...vagina...type in vagina sometime using moderately safe search. It's amazing what you'll find.

The human body. I'm sorry, but it's freaky and it scares me. After The Vagina Monologues I take it you are never supposed to be scared of your own body.  I rarely look at my body, it's just bodies in general I find bizarre. Just look at them. Sort of like certain words, if you just stare and stare them. The word 'thing' for example. All the 'ing' words come to think of it--spring, sling. 

C'mon, stare at it:  THING.

Samuel Beckett wrote a novel where an disembodied head was speaking. I totally relate to that head.  I've never been all that into my own or others' anatomy. If everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian I am definitely a Platonist. I forget about my body, I forget to eat, I forget to sleep. I can gain or lose large amounts of weight before I really notice a change.  I tried very hard to understand why women wanted natural childbirth but never could. (I do understand it now. A bit, anyway.) I occasionally care what I look like but honestly, it's almost as if I can't really see myself. I suppose that's true for everyone.  It's strange but I could care less whether I'm pretty anymore. I want only to look (1) smart and competent and (2) less insane than I am.  No make that (2) not insane! Not insane at all!

Do they have haircuts for that?

What's Your Motivation?

I was going to write a charming expose of myself and my own insanity but I think I'll save it for later.

If you are curious, let me just say--remember that Howard Hughes movie with Leonardo DiCaprio? Remember some of the crazy things Howard Hughes does in the movie? OK, that movie freaked me out because I do a fair number of those crazy things. Me 'n Howard Hughes, we had so much in common.

And if I were absurdly wealthy, I might do a lot more, many more Howard Hughes-ish things.

But you'll just have to wait if you want to hear the details!

I realize letting someone know about my insanity now is kind of bad. It's kind of like telling people you are crazy in a personals ad. The thing you're supposed to do is lure them in with an ad that talks about how you like hiking and spending time with friends and going out dancing or whatever those normal people do. Then, once they've gotten to know and like you, you whip out the craziness. By that time, they realize yes, she's crazy but really, she's not so bad.

This is what I did to my husband (although we did not meet through a personals ad). The thing is, my husband doesn't mind at all (or doesn't seem to mind) that his wife is stark raving mad. I doubt though, if he'd had a strong inkling of it before we got involved, he would have opted to be married to a lunatic.  He deals well though, with the hand he's been dealt.

I'd lure you in first, but I just can't think of anything else to write at the moment. When you are crazy, the insanity looms large and sort of obscures other topics.

But oh, wait! I'm not supposed to tell you about that now.

The other thing I've been thinking about: What's my motivation? Sort of like actors are supposed to (I wouldn't know if they really do this, having never acted).  When you ask yourself this in daily life you find that it's not so easy most of the time to know what your motivation is. Why the fuck am I doing this?

Most of the time I don't really know why I'm doing what I'm doing. Some to much of my behavior isn't welcomed by me. Some might even be classified as irrational, self-destructive, unwise. Most of it? I'd rather I was doing something else. I told myself to do something else.  Yet, here I sit, writing this balderdash and why? It's not what I should be doing? It wastes precious time, time that is so desperately precious. So why? Why do I do it?

I have no idea.

(One of my favorite lines from this movie "Reversal of Fortune" where Jeremy Irons played some guy named Claus who was accused of murdering his heiress wife Sunny Von Bulow. When the lawyer says to him "you're a strange guy" he replies "You haf no idea." He gets off though. Mere strangeness does not make you a killer.)

What's harder and easier than determining your motivation is determining your justification. Try to determine not only what's the explanation for what you are doing but how is right for you to be doing that?  How is this the thing you should be doing?  For example, what's my justification for keeping this website going?

It's harder to say what your justification is because there are so goddamn many things we can't even begin to justify. There are so many better things we could be doing instead of watching television/eating that cheesecake/writing that blog/surfing the internet/taking that 3 hour bath. It's easier because often you can just make some shit up, and that's OK. With a motivation, there's some truth to the matter.  You can make shit up about what your motive is, but you'd be lying to yourself.

Well, I know what motivated me to write this, and what motivates whatever I write--and that's my distaste for what I wrote immediately before. I toy with the idea of deleting what I wrote but then I think I'll just paper over it with another post, perhaps one more innocuous than the one I wrote before.

I don't have a justification. To work out my cosmic problems? To understand myself? To ease the pain of daily life? I wrote another website in the years 2002-2004 and more people read that one and then I abandoned it (although I plan to ocassionally plagiarize myself) like an unwanted baby. Why start again?

Why indeed.

There are a number of things it's not all that easy to give justifications for, you can't really say this is the best thing I could be doing right this moment and if you add from a moral perspective it becomes even more dubious. For example, why have children? You are going to create another person? Who do you think you are, GOD?

It's hard to say 'no really, it's the right thing, creating this other person.' I mean, actually, that it's hard to prove it's the right thing, in advance. There are so many rebuttals available to the skeptical voice who doubts you can justify this person-creating business. There are lots of children about who need parents, why not just take one of those and parent it? If you say, "I want it to have my genetic structure/look like me/be a descendant and carry on the line" that looks kind of self-centered. You are going to create a whole 'nother PERSON just so that there will be a person in the world who looks like you? Doctor Mama wrote about how she wants this and it's a 'stupid reason' but my thinking is: It is one of those desires that runs so deep we can't even justify it.

It's strange though, because when you do have the child and she starts to become a person you think to yourself good Lord, what if I'd never created this person. This person, this person, she is glorious. If she didn't exist, she really should have.

That's the thing you don't know in advance.

WWOD?

This is what I always grab at the gym

The Atlantic

The Economist

The New York Times Magazine or a left over Week In Review or the NYRB

and O Magazine

The Atlantic tells you how terrible everything is. In fact, they all do in one way or another.  This is why I get them. I am cravenly anxious about everything but I torment myself by finding out more and more things to be distressed about. If you enjoy believing we are in the end times or facing catastrophe, you too might want to read these things.

So how does O Magazine fit in? You may think there's a disrepancy here, but it's only on the surface. Because O Magazine and only O Magazine, i.e., The Magazine of all things Oprah tells you how you can live in a world of bad, bad things, like the Middle East and the melting polar icecaps and Famine in East Africa and your overly critical mother. 

For do you not know that O Magazine is designed specifically to help you live in a world such as ours, a world of strife and violence and suffering and environmental collapse and poverty and injustice and turmoil and geopolitical instability, obesity and war even if things like the Middle East are only mentioned in passing and then usually in a culinary context?

O Magazine is the cure for all that mankind is faced with in this grim, dark age.

One of the main methods O utilizes is to get you to forget about the strife, etc., etc. Another technique is to think about something nice, something soothing, like a waterfall or if that doesn't work to smell something pleasant, like peppermint or lemons. Phffft, it all sounds so simple as I explain it here. It's not in the least--it's very complex and difficult and requires many experts. I'm just not good at explaining how its done. For that, you must read O Magazine again and again. At least a one year subscription is necessary (unless you go to a gym where O is always there, as I do) but it may be several years before you more than mere glimmers of the light.

It sounds very avant garde, 'O'. And yet it is not. It is just 'O'.

Now, if you are curious about this magazine and want to find it, it's quite easy because every month, on the cover is an extra large picture of Oprah herself, Oprah always.

You cannot fail to find it. The magazine is very large and full of things. Full of things like hope, and bliss and joy and comfort and peace and forgiveness.

They may interview Charlize Theron (about the bad childhood, yes, always about the bad childhood. People tell Oprah EVERYTHING) but, my friend, you better fucking bet that it's Oprah who's going to be on the cover.

God, I love those covers. I examine them so closely. Oprah always wears something thematic--like for a spring issue she will wear green.  I can't help but notice Oprah and the sameness of Oprah all the time makes you so much more attentive to every detail that changes. It's like those Zen artists who painted the same tree branch every day over and over again through each season and for years on end--for seeing is difficult, true comprehension of what is, is not easy and I believe this is the lesson the Oprah herself wants to give us.

Oh, who am I kidding. I love Oprah, the woman herself.

I have these strange unconscious beliefs, I realized one day. Among these: The belief that I am going to go to Japan at some point for a long visit; that I'm going to be fabulously wealthy; that I'm going to be in a high speed car chase.  But the surprising subconscious assumption I have, one that never makes it close enough to the surface for me to examine and question it-- is that I'm going to be really, really good friends with Oprah.

Someday, Oprah is going to need me.

For Oprah is the sort of person who would be a friend, a true friend, not just a friend that buys you diamond pendants and extreme amazingly fabulous face cream and lends you her personal chef and always remembers what number your cholesterol count is but a friend who will want to know everything EVERYTHING about you. And who will not just say 'oh, everyone is beaten/neglected/ugly as a child but someone who will care. ALOT.

Not like those other friends, those friends who just buy you a beer once in a while but make you feel so guilty about it you end up buying them a six pack the next time you come over to visit.

Actually, I don't have any friends. But if I did, I know that is what would happen. Still, thanks to O Magazine I will not be bothered by this, I will take out my affirmation cards (conveniently perforated and put within O Magazine like a present they made just for you) and read them and be filled with the light of forgiveness and inner tranquility.

O Magazine has a kind of strange feature, however. An almost mystical feature.  There are experts on virtually every thing you can imagine and their wisdom is dispensed by the bucketload in each thick, glossy issue of O.

And yet, it is almost impossible to remember anything that you've ever read in O shortly thereafter. You can pick up your copy of O from last month and it is as if you never read it. The advice, it seems vaguely familiar. Be goal oriented or stop being so goal oriented or laugh more. Vaguely, as if it were a dream, you remember getting that advice...and yet, and yet...did you? Why can you not remember it? The waters of lethe close over the O reader quickly.

One cure is to supplement your reading of O with regular (and by this I mean daily, not including weekends) viewing of Oprah.  They really need to go together.

I'm being snide here but this is all prompted by a realization--at all the dark points of my life, it seems, I gravitate to Oprah. Oprah draws me in. I remember--during one particularly troubled long distance relationship when stuck in my lover's house and alone all day*--the hours would drag by, the ticking clock, I'm trying to write my dissertation but the more I sit there the more agitated I become...by 2 p.m. I'd be positively...well, napping sometimes, but nervously napping--and then, and then--I'd realize there was a goal in my shapeless, meaningless day and that was to wait for Oprah to come on at 4.

The loneliness would lessen, the feeling that annihilation was better than this continued hollow existence would dissipate and Oprah--or her guests, specialists in the most insane and random areas of human life--would tell me to drink more water, drink lots and lots of water or something (the water drinking is the only thing that ever took) and...I don't know. I realized there was hope. Kind of. Not really, but I realized some people thought there was hope. Some people don't let things like genocide and the fact that the stain of humanity's crimes will never be washed from the earth get them down. It's not that they never talk about genocide on "Oprah". I'd bet my life savings that Oprah's already done a show about genocide. But you know what, no matter what horrors they confront, Oprah goes on and "Oprah" goes on and so you can get up in the morning too, or at least in the mid-morning. More to the point, you should.

Basically, the theme is 'if you have the right information, there is no reason whatsoever to kill yourself.' And 'you can always be better.'

And sometimes we all need to hear that.

For Some, It Is A Very Bad World

I was going to say that there are two kinds of people...but no, obviously there are more than two kinds of people.  Yet, I've divided the world into two kinds of people. One kind I call 'the coupon clippers' and the other kind I call the 'people who keep stuff in boxes in the kitchen. For years, sometimes.' (PWKTSIBFYS)

I am the unfortunate offspring of a marriage between coupon clippers and PWKTSIBFYS. Yet, it isn't really genetic, I don't think. I am decidedly a PWKTSIBFYS but I have yearning for the placidity available to coupon clippers.

Now I'm realizing that there are more than just CCs and PWKTSIBFYS. Because 'Coupon Clipper' indicates thrift and in fact there are other sorts of order mongers that are not thrifty but I'll have to come with another name for those categories later. It's late.

Coupon Clippers: 
Go to bed and get up at the same time every day.

They plan dinner. They make dinner. They eat dinner sitting down.

They write shopping lists and then follow their shopping lists.

They remember birthdays. They care about things like birthdays. If your birthday is in June, they do not send you a present in July.

They don't contemplate suicide on a regular basis, only requiring psychopharma after great personal tragedy or major trauma. And then for short periods.

They do not call people up in the middle of the night they have not spoken to in years.

They either can't write poetry or they write bad poetry. (I say this and now wonder whether Wallace Stevens was a CC. That's his reputation and yet I will really have to see a lot of evidence before I'll willing give up this category.)

They finish their antibiotics.

And the rest if obvious: Don't experiment with illegal drugs, have never dropped acid, aren't into Dada, don't relate to Kafka, don't obsess about imminent apocalypse or ecological destruction, etc.

Often like their job at the x. Are capable of liking their job.

Are not always able to understand irony.

People Who Keep Their Stuff In Boxes In The Kitchen
Can relate, in a personal way, to Eugene O'Neill characters.

Have stayed up all night to finish reading Crime and Punishment or even cleaning out the garage.

Find odd things in their coat pockets. Sometimes very odd things.

Will try absinthe, even if they've never heard of it before, once you describe it to them.

Delay dental work, don't finish their antibiotics, would be diagnosed as having 'something' from the DSMV IV, perhaps several things, perhaps a whole cluster of symptoms. (They may avoid medication but if they request it and describe their inner life a bit, no doctor will tell them 'oh, you don't need that.')

Feel a vague sort of guilt, some of them feel this all the time. They wonder whether they are still supposed to save the world.

Would be unafraid not only to wear different socks, but even different shoes. Do not always know where their shoes are. Unaccountably lose things like shoes.

Are very unlikely to become president.

It's a very deep sort of division, actually, much like the red-blue divide. Obviously, PWKTSIBFYS tend to be capable of writing decent poetry, have experimented with marijuana, vote democrat (if they vote at all or if they aren't communists) and shop at Target.  Sometimes the statistics will surprise you--like you expect the Coupon Clippers to have longer happier marriages and yet they have an even higher divorce rate than the PWKTSIBFYS. You expect the Coupon Clippers, who tend to like concrete things like social science if they are intellectual in any way, to watch more television. But surveys show that in fact it is the PWKTSIBFYS who are more regular viewers of television.