Špeky

say hello to my new friend. just so you know how cute she is, she got the hiccups today.

The Land of the Free...

I discovered this map in the US Embassy in Prague, next to a biography of George W. Bush. After I died laughing I started thinking about the implications of making a "map of freedom" and projecting that on the rest of the world according to a specific set of standards (in this case, the standards of Freedom House). Anyway, I'm not going to make any political statements regarding this map, but I'll allow you to form your own opinions.

A Post Born from Indecision

Two years ago I took a class called Decision Processes (Psych 449) with Prof. J. Frank Yates and was introduced to the concept of the two extreme decision making types: "maximizers" and "satisficers." Their names really are self-explanatory, the former being an individual who wants to achieve the very best in every facet of his decision and the latter being one who focuses more on meeting the minimum criteria for their decision (is he at least satisfied with the outcome).

I found an article online by Nicholas Hall which purports that satisficers are known to be "happier, more satisfied, [and] less depressed" supposedly because they spends less time ruminating over the details of a decision. However, I wonder if for a natural maximizer this really is the case. I think about how decision regret and doubts can overwhelm some decision makers to the point that the anxiety of the decision produces such a negative effect that it masks the positive aspects of the actual outcome.

I've really been thinking about how this sort of decision making takes place in the context relationships. At the risk of sounding sexist, I've known many women who suffer from the maximizing mindset in their relationships (and maybe this is true for men as well, I've just had more experience speaking with females on this subject). From early on girls are encouraged "never to settle" and to seek out the individual who will be "the one," as if there will be no happiness to be had otherwise. In my opinion, this can be an extremely damaging mindset. I've had friends who have abandoned wonderful partners on the basis of the chance that someone slightly better might be waiting out there in the sea of options for her still.

Now by no means am I suggesting that people shouldn't set high expectations for their lifetime partner, but they should be reasonable. There shouldn't be endless lists of perfection criteria or the expectation that relationships should be easy and flawless. I have a feeling that our generation struggles with this more than previous ones as a result of growing up in a world of full of diverse options for both the important decisions (e.g. college choice, profession) and the unimportant ones (e.g. which cell phone will impress my friends the most, and which fast food restaurant should I eat at tonight).

If you want to figure out where you fall on the maximizing vs. satisficing scale, take this short quiz.

(FYI: I scored as an "Extreme Maximizer")

You Are What You Eat

For the past couple of months I've been dabbling in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, reading a chapter or two when I have a spare moment. Beyond putting together a commentary on the flaws of American food production and distribution, Kingslover does a lovely job (and I do mean lovely, because she has a beautiful way of using metaphors and humor to make a sobering subject interesting) of highlighting our inability to live with restraint. Throughout the book Kingslover emphasizes the importance of eating produce only when it is in season, and reminds us how the structure of food distribution in our country makes it easy for us to ignore the natural life cycles of the food we eat.

In one chapter Kingslover shares an anecdote (one with which any of us could relate ) from a time when her hostess at a party served an extravagant variety of fresh produce in the dead of winter. Most of us wouldn't think twice about this. But in the middle of winter think about how far fresh produce must travel to get to somewhere like Michigan. Kingslover quotes a statistic that "transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel"! Think about the environmental impact of the way we're living. It's absurd for me to think about how we compromise the quality of our food and our environment simply so we can eat what we want whenever we want. Kingslover says, "The conspicouous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners."

This is not to say I've enacted all of the necessary changes in my life to live by Kingslover's advice. It isn't easy or convenient to eat locally and sustainably grown food. But if you're interested in learning a bit more on this subject and related issues, visit some of these websites:

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/ark/index.html
http://nffc.net/
http://www.wn.org
http://journeytoforever.org/

Equal and Opposite

I am not one to make my personal thoughts vulnerable to the public eye, but apparently I am one to succumb to peer pressure, so here begins my blog.

Marilynne Robinson writes in her novel Housekeeping that "...memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows." That metaphor might have two distinct meanings, equal but opposite. You can imagine being the observer of lighted windows, glancing in on private moments of people's lives as you pass. In this interpretation the nature of memory making or memory recall seems to be passive, or at least molded more by your environment and by your thoughts about brief moments of action around you. I prefer the alternative interpretation, albeit more self-centered, because it seems to me a more accurate outlook on memory. At night in lighted houses, looking out, you may observe a shadowed outline or a bright light, but only the distinct moments of light and dark seem to penetrate the most prominent image you can see...your own reflection. In your memories you create an image of yourself that is a product of your own thinking. In fact, here now, I write to reaffirm my perception of who I am. It's interesting to think about the moments and thoughts we might chose to be important enough to shape the contents of something as insignificant as a blog. But these writings become reflections of who we are, and eventually when we return to re-digest the contents, these words will become a part of our memories, whether significant and accurate or not. The fallibility of memory is actually not as disheartening (at least to me) as it seems. The human capacity to whittle down the complexities of life into the self-determined moments of importance makes life bearable and somewhat understandable. I like the idea of having a blog because I like the idea of returning to it and catching a glimpse of pieces of who I was then. As Robinson continues on the subject of memory later in her novel, "What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?"