The Guinea Pig Diaries (27 page)

That year changed me more deeply than anything since going through puberty (an experience that also involved odd facial hair growth, come to think of it). It changed me in ways large and small. Perhaps most notably, it’s given me a sense of gratitude. Thanksgiving is a huge theme in the Bible, and I got carried away saying prayers of gratefulness. (I’d be thankful the elevator came when I pressed the button, thankful it didn’t plunge to the basement when I stepped inside, and on and on.) I’ve tried to retain that point of view. I try (emphasis on the word
try)
to be thankful for the one hundred little things that go right every day instead of focusing on the three or four that go wrong—which has been a radical shift in perspective. Every night, I spend several minutes listing some of the things for which I’m grateful. I ask Jasper to do this as well—though he’s always thankful for the same three things: Wii bowling, Wii baseball, and Wii golf. It’s a start, anyway.

I also try to keep the Sabbath. I’m a convert to the idea that we need a sanctuary in time (something I talk about in the Unitasker essay as well). I don’t observe Shabbat in the Orthodox Jewish sense—I still flick on and off lights on Saturdays—but I try my hardest not to check e-mail or talk on the phone.

In my daily life, I still sin all the time. But . . . I think I sin about 30 or 40 percent less than I used to. One of my big battles is with gossip. My biblical year taught me that gossip, though it’s mighty tasty, as the Bible says, can be shockingly corrosive. If you cut down on negative speech, it changes the way you think. You begin to have a more optimistic view of the human species. Which I really need these days.

I’m still agnostic, but after my year, I did end up joining a synagogue in our neighborhood. It’s reform. And we don’t go very often. But Julie and I did join. And for now, Julie and I are sending our kids to the synagogue’s day school. I actually don’t care if my sons grow up to be hard-core atheists or steadfast observers, as long as they are good people. Mensches, if you will. But I thought it’d be nice to give them a little taste of religion so that they can make a decision for themselves.

The result is, Jasper now knows more Hebrew than I do. It’s kind of disorienting. He’ll come home and I don’t know whether he’s spouting the usual four-year-old nonsense words, or if he’s saying a blessing.

As for the encyclopedia book, one of the most long-lasting effects was to fuel my curiosity. It gave me a little appetizer-sized taste of all these fascinating topics, and inspired me to try to keep on ingesting knowledge.

I can’t say I remember everything I read in the encyclopedia. I’ve forgotten, oh, 99 percent of it. But in my defense, 1 percent of the encyclopedia—that’s still a whole bunch of information. I still have way too many facts rattling around in my brain. I know this because no matter what I see, it somehow triggers a fact. It’s like a sickness. I’ll see a cat, and I’ll think of how the Egyptians made mummies of their cats—but they also made mummies of mice so that the cats would have something to eat in the afterlife. Very considerate. Oh, and no matter how hard I try, I still can’t forget that René Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.

2
How about Internet dating
:
In case it helps any online daters, I present the extended list of my instant deal breakers:

Pirate talk in the opening e-mail (One guy wrote “Avast ye matey! I’m comin’ aboard.”)

User names that contain allusions to the Kennedy assassination (e.g., Zapruder, unless the guy happens to be named Zapruder)

The suitor demanding a fast reply, because he only has one day left on his free trial (I got that several times.)

The suitor using the same opening line he used a month ago, oblivious to the fact that he’d failed the first time. Namely: “Your pic brightened my day. The rest of the day was terrible—I lost my cell phone on the Long Island Rail Road. LOL!” He apparently loses his cell phone a lot.

24
Sexiest Woman Alive
:
For those who are wondering. Jessica Biel was named
Esquire
’s sexiest woman that year. And yes, she does like swordfish!

24
I outsource a whole mess of online errands to Asha:
Asha also signed me up for Netflix, and I outsourced my movie picks to her. She did pretty well. Her first five choices were:

Man on Fire
(not usually my kind of movie, but really sharp)
Catch Me If You Can
(a great tale)
Minority Report
(If I hadn’t seen it in the theater, it’d be a good choice.)
The Terminal
(I didn’t love it, but I’m glad I saw it.)
Patch Adams
(I didn’t love it, and I’m not glad I saw it.)

33
an entry in Wikipedia:
Sadly, Honey’s edits to my Wikipedia entry were removed by stern Wikipedians who called them “nonsense” and “generally unencyclopedic.”

35
My team is good:
Another reason I loved my outsourcers is that they could be forceful when called for. Theirs was an extremely polite and diplomatic variety of force, but still, very impressive. I remember wondering if an article I’d edited might be mentioned on the magazine’s cover. So Honey wrote to the art director: “If we add two lines of text about this sizzling scene, it would make the layout attractive. It
might also serve as an ’eye-catcher.’ I’m sure you would like this idea. However, the entire decision does vest upon you.”

And finally, if you’re interested in outsourcing your own life, here are some options:

• GetFriday.com: This is the division of Your Man in India that was founded after the article came out. To sign up, you can e-mail [email protected]. Prices vary, but in one plan you pay ten dollars a month for the service, plus fifteen dollars an hour for the tasks.

• Brickwork: the company that employed Honey. You can reach them at [email protected]. Their website is www.b2kcorp.com/.

• If you want to work with a U.S.-based company, you can try Do My Stuff (www.DoMyStuff.com). This is sort of like a cross between Craigslist and eBay. You post a task, and assistants put in a bid to work on it. I’ve never used it myself, so I can’t vouch for its quality, but it’s an interesting idea.

45
Ass Crack, Virginia:
That’s a lie. I actually said “Butt Fuck, Virginia,” but the chapter was so obscenity-filled already, I censored myself on the page.

57
do
not
want to have a playdate:
The fuller story—which I recounted in
The Year of Living Biblically
—is this:

Julie, Jasper, and I went to a local hot dog joint and sat next to another family.

“Julie Schoenberg?” asked the ponytailed mom.

It was an acquaintance Julie hadn’t seen since college. Hugs were exchanged, compliments toward babies extended, spouses introduced, mutual friends discussed.

At the end of the meal, we got our check, and Julie’s friend said, “We should all get together and have a playdate sometime.”

“Absolutely,” said Julie.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said.

Julie’s friend laughed nervously, not sure what to make of that.

Julie glared at me.

“You guys seem nice,” I said. “But I don’t really want new friends right now. So I think I’ll take a pass.”

Brad Blanton talks about the scary thrill of total candor, the
adrenaline rush. I felt that. I heard myself saying the words, but they seemed unreal, like I was in an off-Broadway production.

Julie was too angry to look in my direction.

“It’s just that I don’t have enough time to see our old friends, so I don’t want to overcommit,” I said, shrugging. Hoping to take the edge off, I added: “Just being honest.”

“Well, I’d love to see you,” said Julie. “A.J. can stay home.”

Julie’s friend pushed her stroller out of the restaurant, shooting a glance over her shoulder as she left.

61
“You’re a clue”:
I couldn’t figure out a way to search
New York Times
crossword puzzles, so “forty-eight down” is a guess. If anyone knows the real number, please let me know.

64
send me to the Oscars:
I wasn’t the only
Entertainment Weekly
writer at the Oscars that year. When I worked there,
EW
got a handful of tickets for the reporters. One ticket went to me, another to Jessica Shaw, who acted as my publicist during the night. Jessica did double duty, actually getting quotes from nonfake celebrities.

67
Julia’s vanity production company:
To be fair, Julia Roberts’s production company, called Shoelace Productions, did have partial involvement in producing a couple of movies, most notably
Stepmom.

69
Would the actresses be willing:
I’m still grateful and amazed my bosses at
Entertainment Weekly
allowed me to propose via the
Sex and the City.
It’s one reason I can be glad I didn’t work at
The New Yorker.
Would Seymour Hersh be allowed to ask Rahm Emanuel to make a video for his son’s bar mitzvah?

70
The headphones are tuned:
My inadvertent eavesdropping on Kim Cattrall had a fictional parallel in the romantic comedy
Notting Hill.
Hugh Grant’s character visits Julia Roberts’s character on the set of her new movie, and hears her trash-talking him over his wireless headphones. Their story ended more happily than mine and Kim’s.

75
An opposing study argues:
The alternate thesis—that narcissists flock to show business in the first place—can be found in the book
The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America,
by Dr. Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young. The authors came to their conclusion after questionnaires filled out by celebrities revealed they were huge narcissists even at the start of their careers. Reality stars were the most narcissistic, by the way. Musicians, the least.

78
But then I read a new book:
The coauthor of
Nudge,
Cass Sunstein, is my first cousin, once removed. Which probably makes me irrationally biased toward him.

79
In the kitchen, I find Julie:
Julie may be irrational sometimes, as we all are. But she can also be the most rational person I know. She had no qualms about taking a flight just three weeks after 9/11. I wouldn’t go within a mile of an airport. But in retrospect, she was more rational.
The Black Swan
has an interesting section on all the deaths caused by the increase in car traffic after 9/11.

85
an astounding number of superstitions:
If you want to understand superstitions better, I’d recommend looking to B. F. Skinner’s pigeon trick. Skinner was the Harvard psychologist famous for two things: attempting to reduce almost all human behavior to stimulus and response, and raising his daughter in a laboratory box (the second is an urban legend).

I’m no Skinnerian behaviorist when it comes to humans, but I think his pigeon trick provides a helpful analogy to understanding superstitions, and the confirmation bias in general. I learned about it from
Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition,
by Connecticut College professor Stuart A. Vyse.

Okay, here’s the trick:

Before a speech, Skinner would put a pigeon in a cage. The cage was rigged so that at regular intervals, without fail, a food pellet would drop down a chute into the cage. Nothing the pigeon did could make the food come slower or faster. It was all based on clockwork. So Skinner would bring the cage into a lecture, then put a cloth over it and put the cage to the side. An hour later, he’d finish his speech and unveil the pigeon.

Invariably, the pigeon would be exhibiting some zany behavior. It’d be walking in circles. Or pecking furiously at the floor. Or bobbing its head like a white guy at a jazz club. See, the pigeon had come up with a cockamamie theory that its head bobbing had caused the food to drop. So it continued doing it, fueled by the confirmation fallacy.

My version of nutty pigeon behavior comes in many varieties: swallowing in pairs or repeatedly touching the faucet, for instance. Pretty much everyone I know engages in magical thinking, in this illusion of control. It’s just a matter of to what degree.

I called Vyse to talk to him about it. The exchange I remember best was this:

“I notice you say in the book that superstitious people are associated with lower intelligence.”

“It’s a very slight correlation,” he said.

“But it’s there?”

“Yes. But it’s very slight.”

To make me feel better, Vyse told me that at Harvard, there’s a statue of patron John Harvard, and there’s a superstition that you’ll get a good grade if you touch his left foot before an exam. “The foot is entirely worn off.”

118
strange obsession with his compost pile:
The John Adams manure fact is a reference to something I learned while reading the encyclopedia. As I said in
The Know-It-All:
“ . . . the strangest passage ever published in
Britannica
’s history is about John Adams, in the section on his retirement. It says he spent his time writing letters, ’enjoying his tankard of hard cider each morning before breakfast’ and ’rejoicing at the size of his manure pile.’ Now, it’s moderately strange that the second president of the United States was sloshed before breakfast. But that he derived joy from the size of a pile of excrement? I just don’t know how to interpret that. It occurs to me, though, that this might make for a nice monument to this American hero—a marble replica of his twenty-foot-high manure collection. Take that, Mount Rushmore!”