Monetary Penalty

CMC’s South Quad is bordered by Sixth Street, and walking down it is the first step toward getting to Claremont Village. There’s a corner with a crosswalk where Sixth intersects with Mills, but that’s about half a block out of the way, so typically I’ll just jaywalk. Once, after sizing up the speed of oncoming cars, I stepped out to cross and noticed that the closest one was accelerating and swerving toward me. So, I stepped back to the curb.

It turned out that the car’s driver was Dan. Once it was clear I was out of the way, he decelerated and veered back toward the middle of his lane. I smirked at him as he passed. He looked toward me and waved.

As this was happening, an old woman who was walking on the other side of Sixth Street stopped to watch the scene unfold. I like to think that she muttered something about whipper-snappers and shenanigans, but that’s just wishful thinking. What makes her important to the story is that when I did eventually get to the other side of the street, she was mad at me.

I didn’t think this was fair, given that I wasn’t the one who initiated Dan’s swerve, nor had I really participated except to react to it. Nonetheless, she was mad that I was amused.

A better person would have simply acknowledged her point and moved on, but I, as I always do, felt the need to equivocate. “I know Dan,” I explained, “He’s harmless.” After all, it’s not like he was just going around scaring random street-crossers.

She didn’t buy it. She chose these words: “All I know is, one day there will be a monetary penalty for that sort of behavior.”

It is worth noting that we do not need to wait for such a Utopian day; reckless driving is a ticketable offense in our very own time. Still, what’s more interesting about her response is what she could have said instead. Particularly, she could have gone with “one day he’ll end up hurting someone.”

One reason to prefer the response she didn’t choose is that it better expresses the reason she was upset. When she first saw Dan’s car speed up and swerve, I doubt she grew concerned that he’d get pulled over, imagining him writing a check and cringing. Rather, I’m sure she thought she might be seeing a violent accident, a car out of control and a helpless bystander. These are the gut, human reactions that make us stop, watch, and condemn, not concern about other people paying fines.

The other day I had lunch with my friend David, who majored in philosophy and minored in economics at Clark University. He explained that he had intended to do a full double major, but backed off of the economics in light of a particular frustration. It was one that I share: that often theories that are controversial in philosophy and politics are presented as economic fact. For example, people will say that economics indicates that it is better for the government to adopt a certain policy, simply assuming that the single goal of government is to promote aggregate economic growth. This may be true (I don’t think it is), but the overriding point is that it is a philosophical claim, not an economic one, and thus one that economics cannot evaluate. Nonetheless, without background in political philosophy, people often miss that part of the debate.

That brings me to the second thing that’s funny about the old woman’s response to Dan’s driving. It implies that a “monetary penalty” is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Clearly the comment was meant to be forceful, so why not mention the scariest consequence you can? She might have mentioned the potential danger to Dan himself, but went with the ticket reference instead. The economic results were closer to the front of her mind than the human ones. That’s, I think, what David was worried about.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Back in 2006, Columbia High School allowed non-freshman to leave school for lunch. This meant they could pick up sandwiches from Blimpie, Jamaican beef patties from J&J’s, or pizza bagels from the A&P. It also meant that it was very easy to cut class during periods six and seven.

A lot of us took to using this lunchtime freedom to eat outside, rather than simply buying food and returning to the cafeteria as CHS’ policy architects had intended. I don’t know if it was the dirty cafeteria that drove us out, or just the allure of the tree that the security guards would shoo us away from if we waited there for friends after school, but whatever the cause, we’d eat under the tree. We modified the plan slightly for rain or snow, huddling under the school’s arching entrance instead. To go back inside would be to give up our hard earned freedom, and even those who brought lunch from home or preferred the cafeteria prices agreed that the stoop was better.

Even though the actual eating took place outside, there was still occasionally reason to buy lunch from the school. Their lines were shorter, prices were lower, and, notably, prices were more convenient. That is to say, a $2.50 sandwich did not become $2.65 after tax, and didn’t leave your pocket full of useless pennies. Nonetheless, given the choice, I was a pizza bagel or J&J’s man, so I’d often leave lunch with a tax-induced jingle in my step. Usually I waited until I got home and tossed the coins in a tin I told myself I’d one day take to the bank, but on one occasion I decided to put them to use.

“A penny for your thoughts?” I asked the nearest person.

“Are you really going to give me a penny?” she asked, reasonably. I had to concede that that was in fact a thought, so I tossed her one and moved on.

“A penny for your thoughts?”

“I want a penny.”

That was undeniably a thought too.

“A penny for your thoughts?”

“Uhm, I like your hair.”

That might have been a lie for the sake of a free penny, but this was a fun game so I let it go. Mostly, I appreciated that this result was not directly related to the expression I began the exchange with. This confirms, I think, why the expression is a dumb one, because as soon as one mentions the potential contract, that replaces whatever the thinker might otherwise be thinking about. We should say, “a penny for your previous thoughts” or maybe the more specific “a penny for what you thought just now.”

Eventually, I ran out of pennies, and had to try a nickel. This struck me as a better deal, because each subsequent thought can follow from the first one, so it’s a proportionally large reward for proportionally less effort. It’s also a better deal for the thought-purchaser, as you’re more likely to get beyond the initial skepticism. No one wanted to take me up on it though, perhaps because at lunchtime no one is in to thinking that much.

Misleading Shirt

I have a t-shirt that reads “Cayman Islands” across the front and has a picture of a scuba tank on the back. If you saw me wearing it, it would not be unreasonable for you to guess that I’d been there, or at least had a relative or friend who had. You might also guess that the relative in question was not creative with regard to gift shopping.

As it turns out, both of those guesses would be wrong. I’ve never been to the Caymans, nor has anyone in my immediate family (at least not while they were a part of my immediate family). In fact, I’ve never been scuba diving anywhere (though my stepdad likes it a lot). Instead, I got the shirt as a hand-me-down when I was little. At the time, it was huge on me, but I’ve since grown into it and wear it on laundry days.

One such laundry day, I happened to be at the movie theater at the Headquarter’s Plaza in Morristown, New Jersey. Headquarter’s Plaza used to be a busy mall, but has since emptied and seen storefronts bought up and turned into office space for low budget law and realty firms. Still, the building has the structure of a mall, complete with a parking structure connected to the building with an elevator.

The movie theater is pretty much the only reason to go to Headquarters, so after a movie lets out (in the case in question, the Tim Burton remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) the crowd leaving the theater will walk together through the non-mall to the elevator. The halls are wide enough that people spread out in the way they do when walking near other people, but want to make clear they are not affiliated with them. These divisions are then challenged at the elevator, when people cram together, recognizing each other as those they’ve been walking within a few feet of without acknowledging.

Usually this results in elevator silence, but sometimes it’ll lead to forced conversation: about the movie, or the weather, or what’s happened to the Plaza. This time, after an initial elevator silence, an old man in a suit looked me over and asked “How were the Caymans?”

“I’ve never been,” I began. I’d intended to leave it at that, but realized that this was unfair to my would-be conversational partner. It sounded curt, and his shirt-based assumptions were completely reasonable. “This is a hand-me-down,” I explained.

I immediately regretted that one too. After my initial response, he probably expected me to say the shirt was a gift, and here I was challenging that assumption too. Who was I to make this guy uncomfortable? All he’d wanted to do was talk about my vacation.

The image must have jarred him, because he paused for a moment. Here he was, asking about expensive vacations to a guy wearing beat up, laundry day jeans and a hand-me-down shirt; he might have worried that he was flaunting his wealth. None of that was true, of course; we’ve been to Italy twice, and one of those trips could have been to the Caymans if I’d had a different heritage or if the Caymans were higher on the family destination list. Still, at this point, I was beyond correcting the guy. What was I going to say? “But I could have been, just in case you were feeling awkward about bringing up expensive vacations. Sorry to have been unclear.”

Anyway, after his pause, the suited man tried to salvage the conversation. “Well, have you been out of the country at all, at least?” I’m not sure what the “at least” was supposed to mean in this context, like somehow wearing a misleading shirt was okay so long as I’d done something approximating what it suggested I had.

“Yeah, I’ve visited family in Italy,” I reassured him as the elevator reached my parking level.

“That’s good,” he said.

I told this story to Max on a New York subway the other day. He was wearing a shirt that proclaimed that life was simple: one must merely eat, sleep, and go caving. Max has never been caving, nor does he like the idea of it, but he does believe that life is simple and involves eating and sleeping. He expressed that he doesn’t like the shirt because of this discrepancy, and a woman sitting near us responded, “But is it really lying to someone to wear a misleading shirt?”

She’s right, of course; it’s not. There’s nothing malicious in making people think you’ve been somewhere you haven’t or like subterranean adventures when you don’t. There’s no duty to make the details of one’s life easily interpretable. I shouldn’t have felt bad about misleading the man in the elevator (several times), but the fact the remains that I did. In part, I think it’s a recognition of having made him uncomfortable, but I also think there’s a universal desire to be understood; it’s a prerequisite for being accepted. Wearing a misleading shirt and saying misleading things about it makes that marginally harder.

A Fable

Here, we break from the anecdote format for moment in the name of short fiction. That can happen sometimes.

A Fable

or

A Short, Moralizing Story about Animals

Once upon a time there were a number of animals in a setting appropriate to the species of the animals present. One animal, the Exemplary Animal, embodied a set of characteristics and predilections deemed to be favorable by the Author, but this fact was not revealed by the Narrator, who for artistic and stylistic purposes had a separate point of view and voice altogether. Another animal, the Admonitory Animal, embodied a set of characteristics and predilections deemed by the Author to be dangerous, countercultural, and subversive, but this fact was also excluded from the fable’s introduction by the Narrator. There were also several other animals who were symbolically unimportant, and who merely served as a means of advancing the fable’s plot.

At a certain point, the symbolically unimportant but nonetheless plot advancing animals acted so as to give rise to a particular situation. The situation required action on the part of both the Exemplary and Admonitory Animals, but their course was unclear. The stubbornly moralizing Author caused the Narrator to go to great pains in describing the situation such that it would be apparent that it mirrored a common human situation familiar to the fable’s audience, albeit oversimplified due to a desire on the part of the Author for universal applicability and some general constraints upon short moralizing stories about animals to deal with complexity without becoming arduously long and muddling the all-important clarity of their symbols.

After consideration, the Exemplary Animal responded to the situation in a way consistent with the traits the Author wished to promote in his fable, and was rewarded accordingly: specifically, in a way suggestive of the idea that audience members who act similarly in corresponding situations might also be rewarded thusly. The Admonitory Animal responded in a way that was not necessarily opposite, but was nonetheless consistent with traits the Author did not look as favorably upon. As such, the Admonitory Animal faced repercussions sufficiently harmful and relevant to his actions so as to communicate to the audience that the actions caused the repercussions and that the repercussions were undesirable.

At the conclusion of the fable, the Narrator—acting in a capacity not envisioned, endorsed, nor fully understood by the Author—drew attention to the contrived simplicity of the situation, the unreasonable and unparalleled lack of complexity in the characters, and the arbitrary nature of a medium in which an author (though not necessarily this one) can impose results of actions while the opposite results are perhaps equally likely, thereby calling into question the very relevance of short moralizing stories about animals as a meaningful way of communicating moral truths.

Then, in an attempt to regain control over the content of his work, the Author revealed a brief, easy-to-remember summation of the lesson he’d hoped his fable to teach, but, inexplicably, it rang somewhat hallow. The Narrator wondered if this could be construed as a statement about the intimidating difficulty of genuine ethical analysis, but decided it was best not to read too much into it.

Caution: Wet Floor

This is a story about your friend and mine, Harshvardhan Chowdhary. It’s also a story that Warren likes to tell. What’s more, I learned recently that it’s a story with disputed details. So, what’s not to like?

Caution: Wet Floor

As you leave Collins dining hall, there’s a ledge with rotating tray-holders, where you drop off your tray with used plates and glasses and whatnot. It then rotates everything back behind the scenes to be loaded into a dishwasher. This area is a bottleneck; everyone finishing a meal passes through it, so it’s a likely place for a spill to occur, either because of a collision or a loss of balance in the avoidance of one.

One particular time, Harsh’s tray included a glass with a small amount of remaining water. When I tell this story in person, I hold my fingers closely together and say “this much,” but suffice to say that even the often-cited optimist would describe the glass as mostly empty, rather than a tad full. During the transition onto the tray-rotator, his glass tipped over, leaving a fraction of a percentage of a portion of a puddle on the floor.

Harsh paused over the spill, and the rest of us motioned for him to continue on out of the bottleneck. The puddle was too small to be worrisome, each of us might reasonably have thought. Nonetheless Harsh, polite and other-regarding as he is, started back toward a “caution: wet floor” he’d noticed in the main part of Collins. The floor it was meant to warn about had since dried, and Harsh was going to return the sign to relevance.

So, the rest of us waited. Just as Harsh reached down to pick up the warning sign, a guy approached the spill. None of us knew him, but he was about twice Harsh’s size, so in successive re-tellings of this story he became “a football player.” Anyway, he stepped in exactly the wrong spot, and the events unfolded like you’d expect them to in a cartoon. His arms swing back, his legs swing forward, his tray lurches upward, he lands on his back.

The football player looked around, understandably dazed. As he regained himself, Harsh returned, placed the warning sign next to him, patted him on the head, and walked out.

The aforementioned disputed detail here is that Harsh walked out silently. He claims to have apologized to his victim. I don’t remember it happening- neither does Warren- but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have. Still, I think the image is fantastic: the unassuming hero arriving too late, but, unflappable, continuing on his way with a comforting pat on the head.

The Universal Appeal of Ice Cream

The Universal Appeal of Ice Cream

As far as I can tell, I am half Italian and half Hoosier. I say “as far as I can tell” because my mom’s family is definitively Italian, but my dad’s family didn’t bother to keep records, so we can only look a couple generations back, and they’re all from Indiana. I’m not sure if it’s because of the uncertainty about where else I’m from or the fact that in Indiana being a good cook is putting more butter in the grits, but I tend to skip the details and self-identify as an Italian.

I used to get up to Indiana every so often for family reunions or my grandparents’ annual Christmas party. These trips yielded several worthy anecdotes about my interactions with Hoosier culture, but for this story the relevant details concern my impression of extended family. Those impressions are, in a certain way, stereotypically American. For us, family are the people who you don’t see except for special occasions, and are happy to joke around with, but at the same time know you’d be uneasy with if you spent more than a day or two together. Add to this that our Thanksgiving table typically only includes neighbors and friends with similarly disconnected families, and you can understand why I take the expression “they’re family” to mean only that they’re related to me, and not to imply anything in particular about how I ought to feel about them.

It was a shock, then, the first time we went to Italy. The story goes that my grandmother on my mom’s side was in regular touch with her family in Italy, but never passed this connection on to my mom and her brother. She didn’t so much as speak Italian at home. So, when a pile of old letters were discovered, it was a revelation. At first mom used Microsoft Word’s awkward translation feature to restart communication, but soon started to work on her Italian and rekindled the association. She visited once on her own, and later brought me and my stepdad.

Real Italians have a different sense of family than I do. Having been out of touch with us for all of mom’s adult life, you might expect that the visit would be jilted, much like the broken sentences they’d read about us. I, for my part, contributed by knowing only just a few words of Italian, certainly not enough to express my amazement and gratitude as we were treated like we’d known them since birth. For them, “they’re family” was an appeal to duty, a reason to love. Apparently they didn’t need any other reason.

One person we met on this homecoming was my cousin Tomaso, who now, six or so years later, speaks wonderful English while my Italian is still rudimentary at best. At the time, though, he wasn’t much closer to being able to communicate with me than I was with him. We resorted to activities we could share without much speaking: passing a soccer ball, shooting hoops, watching his llamas.

Once, after scoring easily on me in our shootout, Tomaso remarked abruptly, “It’s hot.” I agreed, but had to search for a bit before coming up with the right response. Eventually I came up with “Che caldo” (literally, “What heat!”).

Tomaso motioned toward the house, and I followed him inside, where he looked around in the freezer for a minute before emerging with two ice cream sandwiches. It’s weird to think of Italians, the culinary artists, with ice cream sandwiches melting in their hands; but after all, Americans export culture. Maybe he just wanted me to feel at home.

It worked. It’s the image I now associate with the idea of family: two kids who can barely speak to each other smile and eat ice cream together just because they’ve been told they’re family.

The Adlai Stevenson Game

The Adlai Stevenson Game

It used to be that when someone got up to get more food at dinner, my friends and I would pick a phrase to try to get that person to say, or some type of information to get them to volunteer. We’d then direct the conversation toward accomplishing that goal, with the one observed rule that no one was allowed broach the target topic directly. This was called the Frary Game, because of the dining hall it originated in, and it quickly fell out of favor because it was too easy. To win, each conspirator simply volunteered information related to the target information, and the target’s desire to participate in conversation did all the work. The game was also susceptible to self-reference: once people knew about the Frary Game, they either became obstinate about not speaking, or spent the whole time guessing what we were trying to get them to say.

When the Frary Game first appeared to be reaching the end of its viability, my then-roommate Warren and I spent some time trying to come up with a suitable replacement. We liked that the game promoted confusion in people who weren’t in on it, but other than that did no real harm. We also weren’t ready to let go of the snickering satisfaction that comes from being among a small group of people in on something, even if that something is trivial.

It occurred to us that one way to address the problems the Frary Game had encountered would be to increase its scale. We could, we thought, designate an arbitrary number of target people and things for them to say, score a point for a player when they report success, and take that target off the master list. After a predetermined amount of time, or the exhaustion of the targets, we’d declare a winner and come up with new goals. This would solve the self-reference problems and offer a bigger challenge.

While the Macro Frary Game would have been fun, we tabled it when we realized that it failed to capture the best aspect of the initial game: that it was cooperative. The aforementioned snickering satisfaction is derived not just from knowing about something that other people don’t, but from working with other people in light of this information. The Frary Game allowed us to laugh about something together, rather than to take turns laughing at each other.

This realization led us to what was eventually called the Adlai Stevenson Game, named for its first and most successful iteration. Warren and I gathered several players and decided on our friend Ilan as the first participant. I can’t quite remember how, but we settled on a target action as well: getting Ilan to express frustration about Adlai Stevenson.

This proved to be a great choice because it required that the group succeed in creating a situation that would not exist independent of the game. Rarely do people express frustration with presidential candidates that lost fifty years ago. In fact, they don’t usually come up at all. Better yet, we were pretty sure that had he been around at the time, Ilan would have voted for Eisenhower, so there was no chance of getting him to express frustration about Adlai’s losses.

The right strategy, then, was to get him frustrated with the idea of Adlai Stevenson. So, that’s what we did.

Things started off somewhat innocuously. Dan was writing a paper on Stevenson, so he asked Ilan to read it for him. I read enough about him to cherry pick some esoteric facts and brought them up in conversation. “Hey, Ilan, did you know Adlai Stevenson was a Unitarian Universalist? I know; I thought it was interesting too.”

Eventually we ran out of casual ways to bring him up, so we alternated between being more creative and more direct. Grant and I took to shouting “Adlaaaaaaaaaaai Stevensooooooooon!” while throwing off during games of Ultimate Frisbee. Warren and I would run into Ilan and ask who’d win in a fight, Adlai Stevenson or the Fantastic Four.

“Okay, but what about Adlai Stevenson and the Ninja Turtles? You have to admit that one would be a toss up.”

Harsh once stopped him in Collins and exclaimed “The soups are so much better than usual today. They must think Adlai Stevenson is coming or something.”

Once, Matt ran out of ideas and went with “Hey Ilan, ADLAI STEVENSON!”

This kept up for a couple of weeks.

I wasn’t there when Ilan finally cracked. From what I hear, the last straw was a question: if given a choice, what type of sandwich did he think Adlai Stevenson would be? The story goes that he threw his arms back and cried out in frustration.

“Why is everyone talking about Adlai Stevenson?”

Grant and Harsh had the good sense play dumb and ask what he was talking about. We never mentioned the name to him again.