berry crumble

Tomorrow is my aunt's birthday. As per my 2010 custom, I baked her a little something called berry crumble. It was a simple recipe that I'm concerned may go down in February history as simply too plain. We'll see. All it called for was layering frozen berries in an oven-proof pan and covering them with an oatmeal-sugar-butter-vanilla concoction before baking for 30 odd minutes. I pulled it out of the oven and sat at the counter nibbling oatmeal crumbles off the top in an effort to inconspicuously sample it. (I'm afraid it might taste too much like cooked fruit with vanilla oatmeal on top, which sounds good and probably looks better, but will ultimately lead to disappointment.) If it is a failure, I might have to bake her a belated gift, but perhaps a small scoop of vanilla ice cream will spice it up. At the least, it will sound like a menu item that would certainly tempt me: Berry Crumble a la mode. Waiter...I'll take one of those!

another way men are like shoes

The national divorce rate hovers somewhere around 50%, give or take a few points. I'd like to know what the dating break-up rate is, if there is such a statistic. Some human relationships end for valid reasons; others because the hearts involved simply give up. They give up loving, give up caring and, most detrimentally, they give up trying. I purport that if women felt toward men more like how they relate to shoes, we'd see a national decrease in relationship failure. Let me explain.

Most women have a life-long, on-going affair with shoes. (If you happen to be one of those women who do not, forgive my stereotyping; it's fundamental to my theory, though.) We can fall in love instantly with a sandal. And the x-chromosome has, on occasion, gone feral when two women want the same pair of size-8 Jimmy Choos. (I have never personally fought for a shoe, though I have had friendships fill with tension when the other girl feels the same way about a guy as I do.) Once the shoe is ours, we spend the next month in new-shoe inebriation, intoxicated by the leather or giddy with how feminine and delicate it makes our foot appear. Whatever the drug, we're high on it. All because of FOOTWEAR.

Now suppose a girl gets a pebble in that shoe one day. No girl in her right mind would return home and toss that shoe in the trash because of a tiny stone. She'd recognize that the pebble wasn't a reflection on the shoe--how it fit, how it made her feel, her level of adoration--but on the kind of ground she was treading--obviously rocky.

And so it is with men. A pebble interrupts the relationship's journey, and people quickly want to call it quits, throw away the shoe. That shoe is the same one you lusted after when you saw it in the magazine (the analogy fits uncomfortably well), fell in love with at the store, handed over your credit card for and mentally paired with all your favorite outfits. The shoe hasn't really changed--the ground has. Of course, shoes do eventually age. Threads start unraveling, and soles become slightly less supportive. But a lot of the time, even when those shoes are out of fashion by two whole seasons, they're still the favorites. We seem pretty devoted to our shoes; shouldn't we be even more so to our men?

I'm a relationship newbie, and my boyfriend and I don't really fight. We have the run-of-the-mill disagreements, and we don't see eye to eye and nose to nose on everything (in part because he's 6'2 and I'm under 5'5), but we don't fight. As much as I like it this way, I'm not naive enough to think there won't come a day when we temporarily don't like each other. But I hope neither of us wants to give up because of a pebble in the road. I like my shoes a lot, but I like my boyfriend more.

[Photo thanks to http://life-o-life.blogspot.com/]

the paralysis of analysis (or why chess is bad for you)

Jonah Lehrer, author of "How We Decide," was interviewed on NPR (Yes, I listen. You should, too.) about his new book that captures the essence of, well, choosing between boxes of Cheerios. Not really. But that's how it started.

"The revelation occurred in the cereal aisle of the supermarket," Lehrer told NPR host, Terry Gross. "I realized that there were 20 different kinds of Cheerios. There were original Cheerios. There were honey-nut Cheerios, apple-cinnamon, multigrain, the yogurt-with-the-berry thing. And then, of course, there are all the generic varieties of Cheerios.

And so I found myself spending literally a half an hour, 30 minutes, in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying to choose between boxes of Cheerios. And that's when I realized I had a problem, and I became really curious as to what was actually happening inside my head while I was struggling to make a decision"

He classifies himself as "a classic case of paralysis by analysis." He explains this as "simply thinking too much in the supermarket. I come up with long lists of reasons to prefer honey-nut Cheerios, and then I look at the apple-cinnamon Cheerios, and then I come up with long lists of reasons to prefer apple-cinnamon Cheerios. And it goes on and on like that. I'm stuck in this loop of self-consciousness, where I come up with reason after reason after reason."

As Gross points out, one of the crucial concepts Lehrer learned from his book-writing venture was that copious amounts of information (which we usually equate as good, even necessary) can easily translate to an overwhelmed and overloaded prefrontal cortex, the relatively frail division of our brain that's (ironically) responsible for "deliberate, rational decisions." Ergo, spending an exorbitant 30 minutes in the cereal aisle.

To expound even further--it's alright, I don't think you're employing your prefrontal cortex to read this--that specific area of our noggin can retain a mere 7 tid-bits of information at any given time. And it works more efficiently with less than that. Read, for example, a study explained in Lehrer's words:

"One of the studies I talk about in the book concerns a study done by Stanford psychologists who - they had two groups of people. One group they had memorize a two-digit number. The other group they had memorize a seven-digit number. Then they marched these two groups down the hall and gave them a choice between two snacks.

One snack was a rich, gooey slice of chocolate cake. The other snack was a responsible fruit salad. The people who memorized a two-digit number were twice as likely to choose the fruit salad as the people who memorized the seven-digit number, who were twice as likely to choose the chocolate cake. And the reason is that those extra five digits - doesn't seem like very much information at all, just five extra numbers - so overwhelmed the prefrontal cortex that there wasn't enough processing power left over to exert self-control.

So that gives us a sense of just how limited in capacity our brain actually is and, I think, points to the fact that we should absolutely be aware of these limitations."

Yes, limitations. This leads me to the second half of my story.

A twin-pair of Sundays ago, I asked my boyfriend to teach me how to play chess. And he did. He tried. But as we sat there, drawing out the inevitable "check mate" in which I found myself every time, I could have easily spent a generous 10 minutes on each move. (This was the real reason our battles of marble weaponry lasted more than 5 minutes.) I was experiencing paralysis of analysis. Granted, due to my inexperience with the infamous game, more than half of my cognitive energy was spent trying to remember what piece can move where and in what pattern. All in all, it was undoubtedly more than seven pieces of information, and my poor, prefrontal cortex was headed for a meltdown. I did eventually win a game, but that was only by taking play-by-play direction from my boyfriend (being a real-life pawn) in a challenge against his mom, which probably suggests my overload and consequential lapse in judgment. (Is it really a good idea to put your boyfriend's mom in "check mate" in only five moves? Fortunately, she's a sweetheart and didn't hold it against me.)

I've now spent a reasonable amount of time (less than 30 min.) evaluating all the above and reached a simple, either/or conclusion: Either chess is a game that's bad for you or I am very bad at the game.

[You can read or listen to the full Jonah Lehrer story at NPR.]

i declare

CAVEAT:: I'm not lost on the possibility that I've missed something, that I'm speaking entirely out of ignorance. But in case I'm right on...

A pickup with a bumper sticker passed me on the freeway this afternoon. The adhesive declaration was "I brake for trains." Is it just me or does one's reaction to such a proclamation naturally lean toward "duh!"? The situation seems analogous to a small yacht captain sharing his habit of "I slow down for ocean liners." Really, no kidding. Would that be because if you don't, it's going to cream you? I kinda thought so.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I brake for trains, too. I'm not going to test my car's ability to power through the same mass of rail train that requires up to a mile to stop because, quite frankly, I just don't like the odds. For what seem to me like obvious reasons, I also don't feel the need to broadcast this to every passenger traveling behind me. Don't most people brake for trains? My guess is that if you didn't, you wouldn't be here to drive the truck that declares your respect for a transportation force greater than your own. Just a thought.

Since the obvious/ridiculous seems en mode, I'm thinking about getting a sticker to slap on the back of my car. It will say "I stay clear of stampeding rhinos." Of course, you probably do, too. But on the off chance you don't, I just want to let you know that I do.

toblerone

One of my friends is the happy mom to this little guy. He's a Maltese, but I'm suspicious he has the heart of a Doberman (not that you can tell from the photos--I think he was a tad bashful about his sudden stardom). Truth be told, he's all bark and no bite, and we had a fun time on our photoshoot, which was my Christmas gift to my friend. I then took the photos and turned them into a photo book. Here's to Toby, the little big dog! :)

i'll travel to britain...

...and shake the paw of a dog with that name.

[No, he's not mine. He's the k9 of a friend I did senior portraits for.]

tell me, professor...