How do you diagram the sentence, “See Spot run”?

Wow, has it really been a week since I last blogged?

I had an interview with a company this morning. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Wish me luck. In the meantime, Friday is my last day of work at my job.

Last night we watched the season finale of Veronica Mars. Kuh-razy insane. Season finale season (does that make sense? only in the way that “player piano player” makes sense in The Music Man) is upon us. All those cliffhangers and goodbyes, and then maybe I can pull Matt away from the TV for the summer. Or at least until July, when the Stargate franchise resumes.

If you enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica, you must see these caricatures.

A week from tomorrow night I’m going to spend five and a half hours watching Parsifal at the Met. Um, it seemed like a good idea two and a half months ago.

I enjoyed Sunday’s review of the book Stumbling on Happiness in the Times. One Amazon.com reviewer summarizes the book’s salient points:

1) We often exaggerate in imagining the long-term emotional effects certain events will have on us.
2) Most of us tend to have a basic level of happiness which we revert to eventually.
3) People generally err in imagining what will make them happy.
4) People tend to find ways of rationalizing unhappy outcomes so as to make them more acceptable to themselves.
5) People tend to repeat the same errors in imagining what will make them happy.
6) Events and outcomes which we dread may when they come about turn into new opportunities for happiness.
7) Many of the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world – and thus strive to change it.
8) Happiness is rarely as good as we imagine it to be, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will. The same mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness.

I’ve come across these points in the past, but lately I notice how true they are. Losing my job is not (yet) as bad as I thought it would be; it provides new opportunites. Human beings have hope, and if the worst happens, your sense of self-preservation will kick in. Some people will always be happy, and some people will never be happy. The easiest way to change your level of happiness is to change your attitude before your circumstances. Finally, there’s no need for me to be so scared about things in life and the choices I make.

Bush has a 31 percent approval rating in two polls. Do I hear 20s?

This video spoof made by Hillary Clinton is surprisingly funny, and yet she’s so cringeworthingly not a good actor.

That’s all the odds and ends for now.

Why are we attracted to body parts?

I think about this sometimes. The answer, of course, is hormones. But it still seems so weird.

It’s weird that you can be attracted not just to a physical person, but to a piece of flesh. To a calf. A neck muscle. A pec. A breast. A back. Even if that body part is clothed. You can even be turned on by just a hairstyle.

What prompts this is that on my way back from lunch just now, I was noticing breasts. Not in a lascivious way; I was just noticing them. Sometimes you walk into an elevator and there’s a woman in there and you can’t help but notice the woman’s breasts before you notice anyone or anything else in the elevator. You quickly look away and feel embarrassed and wish you could apologize. This happened to me on way out of the building. Later, outside, I noticed a woman’s breasts again, and I felt embarrassed. But how can you not notice? They’re these two protruding lumps of flesh. They’re just… there. Almost looking back at you. But the fascination they create is out of proportion to their being mere lumps of flesh.

Sometimes I think about my feelings. I try to “see around” them. If you say or look at a particular word over and over again, like “yogurt” (yogurt. yogurt. yogurt. yogurt.), the word loses any sort of meaning and degenerates into a series of random sounds or letters.

A similar thing can happen with feelings. I might be sitting on the subway one day, see a guy in a t-shirt sitting across from me, and feel attracted to his arm. There’s just something about his arm that turns me on – perhaps the way the guy is displaying it, perhaps the tendons on the arm, perhaps the arm’s skin tone or the arrangement of the arm hair, perhaps the way the color contrasts with the t-shirt, perhaps the way the rest of the arm disappears tantalizingly up the shirtsleeve. I keep looking at the arm – surreptitiously – and as I stare, the arm eventually devolves into a random shape of flesh with no accompanying context. I start to wonder why we’re attracted beyond all proportion to a lump of flesh of a particular shape. I still find myself attracted to the arm, but now these other thoughts and concepts have become mingled in with it, competing for my attention and complicating what had been a nice simple attraction.

Why are people who are attracted to guys attracted to their muscles? They’re just muscles. Or tendons. Flesh. Shapes. I don’t get why I feel this way.

I wish there were some way to quantify this attraction. I wish there were some device that could detect and measure tiny particles as they pass invisibly from the guy’s right arm to my eyes.

And why is it our eyes that notice these things? Why, if an attractive guy walks past me on the street, might I have a strong desire to turn my head and keep training my eyes on him? Why are we so visual? The reason we’re primarily attracted to someone by sight instead of by smell, taste, hearing or touch is that our sense of sight works at farther distances than the other four senses. But it still seems odd, when you really think about it. You physically turn your head, crane your neck because you find someone attractive. There’s no inherent connection between these two things. The only reason it happens is because that’s the way we human beings are put together.

It seems weird, though. Light bounces off someone’s body and travels to your eyes; your optic nerves send data along an electrical pathway to some primeval part of your brain, and thence to other, more interesting parts of your body, which communicate back to your brain the message “we likey”; your brain thinks “me likey too” and it makes your neck muscles turn so that your head turns so that your eyes will continue to capture the light reflecting off the person so pleasantly. All while drool is trickling out of your gaping mouth.

We’re curious creatures, we humans.