Listen to This, Would Ya?

Listen to This, Would Ya?—Hair Cut

They say you can't trust your feelings, like the ones that suggest you feel like shooting up a shopping mall. "I feel like punching somebody" isn't a feeling you can trust for sure, although "I feel like a sandwich" isn't so bad. Funny, you don't look like a sandwich.

You can't always trust your senses either, it turns out. You know that saying, "believe none of what you read and only half of what you see." Ten people can witness one car accident and then present ten different stories of what happened, all from a different angle and with a life time's worth of preconceived ideas. What we want to be true can distort what we see as well. Some people would look at this picture and see a miracle of Jesus. I live with two cats, so I know exactly what it is. What do you see?

All kinds of things can interfere with your perception—there is a whole world of clutter out there ready to play games with the signals your brain gets from your senses. Some of that clutter comes from within your own head—here is a site with all kinds of visual illusions that will make you question everything your eyes project into your head.

This Virtual Barber Shop is the perfect example of how our senses betray us. It looks like a video, but don't be fooled by what you see. Listen to it with headphones, making sure the left and right parts are in the corresponding ears, and close your eyes. After you've had your hair cut, tell me if you turned your head to follow the sound, and fess up if you cringed or touched the back of your head. And did any of you scream a little at the end, or am I the only one?

No More Mr. Nice Guy

It's good to be a nice person--to say nice things, to do nice things, to write nice things--but I declare an end to the use of the word nice. Nice is what you say when you can't think of any other adjective. Someone shows you a picture of their back yard--that's nice. Someone tells you about their afternoon adventure--that's nice. Or someone describes their childhood in great detail and sometimes with painstaking effort--that's nice. It's a lazy word, and it's non-descriptive. Nice is like mashed potatoes with noodles and chicken gravy all in a big pile on one plate with some canned corn for garnish. Everything is the same color and texture and base substance--starch (this is a favorite Amish dish). Nice is like a partly cloudy day in April when outside feels like inside, and you can't tell a difference between the lighting and the temperature of your living room and the lighting and temperature of your front yard. Nice is a glass of lukewarm water. ...

Ish People

Tell an Ish person to show up around 9 a.m., and you'll see them somewhere around 9 a.m. Tell them to show up at 9ish, and you'll see them anywhere from 9:05 to 9:20. You have given them license to dilly dally, and who wouldn't take advantage of that? The other night at the big shindig dinner party, one of the drummers said the rehearsal the next morning would begin at 9ish. "I am an ish person," he says. Immediately the clanker goes off in my head--oh, good, I thought. I can deliver my daughter a little late. No Ish person is early, so if you say 9ish, that does not mean give or take 5, 10, 15 minutes. It's exclusively a taking phrase. Take an extra 10 minutes to drink your cup of coffee. We won't mind. We're Ish people. Sunday's rehearsal started at 2:00. Because it was conducted by the same people who conducted the Saturday rehearsal, my understanding was 2-ISH. My daughter is worse than I am about taking liberties with Ish time frames, so she d...

Long Live Anita Bowser

You know I occasionally check my hometown newspaper's website to scan the obituaries (morbid, I know, but I'm at that age). Over this past weekend, I read the obituary of Indiana State Senator Anita Bowser . She was a noted Democrat who championed causes protecting the neediest in the state's population. She was respected on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence and plain and outspoken approach to law making. The picture on her senate page is lovely. I remember none of those things about Anita Bowser . My first year or so in college was spent at a branch of Purdue University, and in the early 80s, Anita was a political science professor. She taught my American Government class my freshman year, and she was a mess. Somewhere in my old text book, I have a sketch of her drawn on a particularly dull day in class--her hose sagged at her ankles, her slip showed at least half an inch all the way around, her hair had been slept on but not brushed, and her bright red lip stic...

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