Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Kids Today

At the office, you hear it all the time. Kids today. They don’t work as hard. They’ve got different priorities. They’re not as hungry. They’re a bunch of slackers. You know, kids today.

It’s all true. Well, pretty much all of it. Kids today don’t work as hard. They do have different priorities. Their plump faces show no signs of hunger. And many are slackers, at least when compared with their hard-charging elders.

Most of my older colleagues have a hard time accepting this. Something about kids today really gets under their skin.

These oldsters are the last generation with any direct connection to the Great Depression. They didn’t struggle through it, but their parents did. Their parents won that struggle, achieving unprecedented prosperity for themselves and their children, but they never took it for granted, never forgot the wolf at the door. Somehow they transmitted this to their kids, this sense that you had to work hard to get it and harder to keep it. Some say this is the source of today’s generation gap.

That might be true. My theory, which may only be a sub-theory of the Great Depression theory, is that when today’s oldsters were young, they led this massive rebellion against their parents. In order to change the world, they had to take it over. That was hard work, all that demonstrating and politicking and sitting in and turning on, but they had a purpose, so they soldiered on. They didn’t struggle to survive, like their parents, they struggled to change.

And they won, changing the world and making it safe for kids today. Is it any wonder they don’t struggle? I mean, what would they struggle for? Or struggle against? Kids today have it so good that even they can see it. Their world certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly good enough, so why bother?

And that’s what bothers the oldsters, I think, this innate indolence. It’s insolent.

The other day I caught myself referring to kids today, so I guess that makes me an oldster. I remember the first time I interviewed one of these kids today for a job, and was treated to a 30 minute dissertation of what the candidate needed in order to fulfill himself, as opposed to what we needed to fill the job. That irritated me. Or the reviews I’ve given to kids today that quickly flipped from our review of them to their review of us. I resisted initially, but now I’ve learned to nod my head periodically, a carefully-cultivated concerned encouraging non-threatening look frozen on my face, waiting for my chance to slip the review in edgewise. Umm, that’s great, your career goals and personal growth and all that, but do you think you could start showing up on time?

Sure, there are some kids today with a burning ambition, a fire in the belly, a need to win the game, but not that many. Most are too smart for that. They’ve learned that working hard just attracts more work. Promotions just mean more responsibility. After a certain point, more money just means they own you. You only get one life, and you’re not taking it with you, so don’t worry, be happy.

Back in the Dickensian sweatshop days, the lower classes worked six days, fifty-two weeks, no time for vacation or sick days, clocking over 3,000 hours each year on their grueling back-breaking jobs. Now they’ve graduated into dead-end Dilbertian middle-class jobs of 1,800 hours a year sitting in air conditioned comfort in gleaming mirrored office parks while surfing the internet and bemoaning the pointless emptiness of it all. What’s interesting is that today’s upper classes – the top managers, the highly-paid professionals, the small business owners and other strivers – still work sweatshop hours.

Who won that struggle?

So when I hear them complain about kids today, I have to agree with what they say, but unlike them, I can’t imagine kids today doing it any other way.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

The Squeaky Wheel

The brakes on my mother’s car squeaked very loudly. I’d be sitting on the steps in front of school, or waiting at the little league field, or standing in front of the theater, and I’d hear this faint squeaking sound grow louder and LOUDER! as her car weaved its way through the stop-and-go traffic eventually culminating in a horrific fingernails-on-the-chalkboard shrieking squeak as it stopped right in front of me. And in front of my classmates, my teammates, my friends.

For a sensitive and socially insecure kid, riding around in a shitty car was bad enough; riding around in a shitty car that loudly proclaimed its shittiness to one and all was unbearable.

Flash forward thirty years as I pull my expensive sports/luxury car into the parking garage, roll the window down and slow the car to wave my parking card in front of the reader, and I hear this sharp squeak. I let up on the brakes, the squeak stops, then I hit the brakes hard, and the squeak shrieks LOUDLY!

Shit!

So the next morning as I sit across from the Service Consultant in the dealership’s tastefully-appointed Customer Service Center, cradling a free cup of freshly-ground Kona coffee as my eyes scan over the laminated Ten Point Satisfaction Plan while soothing mood music wafts unobtrusively from expensive speakers hidden in the ceiling, the whole operation exuding the rarified status and refinement we’ve come to associate with our expensively-engineered and decidedly non-shitty automobiles, I expect an understanding reception.

“My brakes squeak.”

“According to our key read, your pads are 6 mm. We don’t service them until they’re down to 3 mm.”

“But they squeak very loudly.”

“We can look at it if you want, but it would be outside the warranty. And brake work’s really expensive, thousands. You don’t want to go there.”

“But my expensive car sounds like a shitty car.”

“I’m sorry, but if it’s not a safety issue, we can’t do anything under the warranty. Bring it back when the pads are at 3 mm, and we’ll try to fix it.”

“So loudly squeaking brakes are a standard feature of your cars? Is that your position?”

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

As I so often do in situations like these, I wonder, should I make a stink? Should I attempt to work the system, maneuver around the impregnable Platinum Customer Warranty Policy? Should I raise my voice, pound her desk, adopt my most crazed look and demand to speak with the Customer Service Manager? Should I threaten them with the nuclear option – giving them a “4” instead of a “5” on my next Customer Satisfaction Evaluation Form? Should I fire off an angry letter to the regional VP for Customer Experience? Should I picket the dealership, my signboard announcing “Squeaky Brakes Sold Here” while ear-piercing shrieking feedback blares incessantly from my megaphone?

And as I so often do in situations like these, I remain cool calm collected as I skulk away, the thought bubble that just read “Hey, life’s too short” switching to furiously-scribbled squiggly lines.

Driving in to work, my mind races through calculations. If my wife and I live to 80, and if we continue to buy or lease two expensive cars every three or four years for the rest of our lives, without accounting for the time value of money, we’ll spend just under $1 million on cars.

One million dollars! That’s 100,000,000 pennies. And not one of those pennies will ever be paid to these purveyors of squeaky-braked cars.

That makes me feel better, a little, as I exit the freeway and zoom down the ramp that deposits me in the middle lane of the street that leads to my parking garage and I signal to merge into the left lane so I can turn into my parking garage and this car speeds up so I can’t get in and I speed up to make an opening and it speeds up too and then I slow down and it slows down too and I look back and it’s a woman behind the wheel fixing me with a look that could kill and now the parking garage entrance is just 200 feet away and I’m thinking – no, I am not thinking, I am reacting – this is my last chance and I stomp on the gas pedal and swerve to the left and look back in satisfaction as she slams on her brakes as I squeak by.

No longer cool calm collected, adrenaline coursing through my brain, I turn into the parking garage, roll my window down and hit the brakes hard as I approach the card reader. SQUEAK! I look up and there she is, in the lane next to mine, so I roll down the passenger window too and yell out over my loudly squeaking brakes: “WOULD IT KILL YOU TO LET ME IN?”

The parking attendant looks startled, his “Good morning!” so abruptly interrupted. She tosses an “Asshole!” at me and rolls her window up, giving me just enough time to lob a “Bitch!” in before she drives away.

Riding up in the elevator, adrenaline receding, a crazed satisfaction settling over me, I survey my eventful morning. Who was that guy? Whatever happened to the cool calm collected me?

The doors open and I stride out into my day, chin up, the squiggly lines in my thought bubble now replaced with “Better late than never.”

Hey, life’s too short.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Thinking Outside the Box

She's doing a planets project, writing a report and building a model of the Earth. She's in third grade now, supposed to do it all on her own, no parental assistance allowed, but as she works so diligently, forming an orange-sized Earth out of modeling clay, painting the inside of a cardboard banker's box black, dabbing in white dots for stars, then hanging her model Earth inside the box with fishing line so that it appears to levitate in space, I ask her whether she's considered adding the Moon.

She has. But how big would it need to be? We look it up. The Moon is a little less than one-fourth the size of the Earth. Measuring, we determine that her orange-sized Earth has a four inch diameter. If she makes her Moon to scale, it would have about a one inch diameter. Sticking with the fruit analogy, her Moon would be a strawberry next to her orange Earth.

Where should she hang her Moon? Can we fit it in my box, she wants to know, or should I have started with a bigger box? If Earth was the size of an orange, a strawberry Moon would be about 10 feet away. That's another six of these banker's boxes, side-by-side, or maybe you could fit them both in a really big refrigerator box.

She looks crestfallen.

Thinking fast, I ask her if she wanted to do the whole solar system, how big would her Sun be? With an Earth the size of an orange, her Sun would have a diameter of about 36 feet. That's a large hot air balloon!, she says, interested again. How far away would we have to hang my Sun? We look that up and figure that if an orange-sized Earth and its strawberry-sized Moon were 10 feet apart, the Earth and its hot air balloon-sized Sun would be 333 feet apart, or a little more than a football field away. That would have to be a huge box, she says, one that holds a 747 or something.

And what about Pluto? Pluto is about two-thirds the size of our strawberry Moon, so if we made a Pluto it would be the size of a large olive. And we'd have to hang it 2.5 miles away from our orange-sized Earth to keep everything in scale. She's laughing now, these distances are just so ridiculous.

And if you think our solar system is big, consider this: If you wanted to add the nearest star -- Proxima Centauri -- to your model, you'd have to hang it over 17,000 miles away from your orange-sized Earth. Her eyes are glazing over, so I stop.

Maybe someday I'll tell her that our Sun is just one of millions of stars in our galaxy, our galaxy just one of a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Maybe I'll try to explain it to her by comparing the universe to a beach and our Sun to a grain of sand, except that there are many more suns than grains of sand and each grain would be separated by thousands of miles. And maybe I'll ask her to consider what that makes us, a speck on a speck in a speck of dust drifting through a cold black void of nothing.

Or as I watch her intently finishing her project, dabbing black paint over the remaining bare spots, her universe compressed into a cardboard banker's box, for now, I think maybe I won't.

Friday, May 05, 2006

NSFW

Late afternoon, the meeting drags while he drones and lunch congeals on a side table. Pen in hand, notepad in lap, body in chair tilted way back, I’m the very picture of rapt and thoughtful attention, or so I hope as I stare intently at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling, the sort with thousands of dots of different sizes, trying to find a constellation up there but the dots evade easy classification, blending together then moving this way and that as my head starts to spin.

I lean forward and move my pad to the table then look up to the window, thinking I need a refreshing gaze out at the horizon to recalibrate my eyes and stop the spinning. And that’s when I see them.

Or did I? In my current ocularly confused condition, I can’t be certain. Must check again. Surreptitiously. So as I turn my head toward the speaker I peer out of the corner of my eyes across the table for just a second, long enough to verify that yes, indeed, my eyes haven’t deceived me, I saw what I think I saw, and I get this burst of energy as the meeting suddenly gets a lot more interesting as I look down and count the second till I can sneak another peek without drawing attention to myself because oh my God! those are two of the finest breasts I have ever seen.

They’re perfectly proportioned, nicely round without being bulbous, not so big that they sag, or so pert that they point, they’re just big enough for two glorious handfuls, and I’m thinking, hey, I have two hands.

They are the Platonic form of Breasts and she displays them with the proper care, enveloping them in what appears to be one of those lacy bras that provide some support while still allowing the breasts to bounce about and find their place, thereby preserving their oval appearance and confirming that they are, indeed, all natural. Implants never drape like that.

She could’ve hidden them beneath a baggy sweater or a suit jacket, but thankfully she didn’t, opting for a tight white blouse that adheres to her curvature, straining outward to leave no doubt of what bulges beneath.

Another scan on the sly and I detect a hint of nipples protruding ever so slightly through the thin fabric encasing these wonders, nipples staring at me across the table, calling out to me, my face flushing as these Sirens try to lure this sailor onto the rocks. I try hard to look away, but I can’t resist their temptation, swinging my head around to the front of the table, drinking them in for two more precious seconds.

I don’t know the woman who owns these glorious globes. Now I wish I did, if only to give me an excuse to drop by her office and visit them. I know her only by reputation, and that reputation is excellent. She’s young, serious, a studious look about her, light make-up, nothing flashy, reminds of a girl I knew from Wellesley. The sort of person who gives no hint from the chin up what she has from the chin down. And that, of course, only enhances the allure, the thrill of discovering what lies beneath. Buried treasure where you least expect it.

I’m careful. I hope she doesn’t notice. I’ll never forget that time they caught that Group VP upstairs staring so hard at a chest that he didn’t even notice that its owner had noticed. That was his third strike so they packed him off to our most intense sensitivity awareness seminar, think of a Betty Ford for wayward gazers. Even worse, he was branded permanently with the dreaded scarlet L for “Lech.” Or was it “Leer”? Or “Lewd”? Or maybe “Lust” in his heart?

Can’t let that happen to me, so I studiously avoid them, staring at my notepad, trying to collect myself, then staring at that guy droning on at the head of the table, a cold shower of sorts, but it isn’t working. They just loom larger in my mind. Must. Think. Of. Something. Else.

Am I bad? I am married, after all, so I’d never actually act on my prurient thoughts, but maybe just by looking I’m committing mental adultery. I remember once I was sitting in a colleague’s office after he’d returned from his honeymoon, and as one of our female colleagues walked by he turned to me and confided that one of her body parts was one of the choicest he’d ever been privileged to see. “But didn’t you just get married?” “I got married, I didn’t go blind,” he said. Now that I’m married, I understand, and I only fault him for being crude and impolite enough to divulge his crude and impolite thoughts. I never discuss my crude and impolite thoughts. Except with you, of course, but just this one time. Never again.

It’s not as if I’m some sort of misogynistic pig who only values women for their attractive body parts. Believe it or not, I’m one of the good guys. I love women. I admire women. I respect women. I listen to women. I read women. I share ideas with women. I work with women. In fact, some of my best friends are women.

Okay, that last part didn’t sound right. What I mean is, women are important to me on so many levels, very few of them lurid. Sitting across from me right now is an intelligent human being, a dedicated member of our team, a hard worker, a high achiever who’s overcome all sorts of challenges to make it here today, and someone who, I am sure, is also empathetic, caring and giving, a valued member of her various familial and social groups. In short, a well-rounded human being who just happens to sport these incredibly well-rounded breasts.

Even when I do scope out a woman’s body, I am not so much interested in her discrete body parts as I am in whether they all blend together in a harmonious whole. This holistic approach tries to appreciate each woman on her own terms. So big breasts, small breasts, round breasts, perky breasts, I don’t really care, so long as they work well with the rest of her body. But in this case, I must make an exception. They’re just so perfect.

This is ridiculous. Just look at what I’ve been reduced to, a Pavlovian dog drooling over a set of mammary glands. William James was right, we’re creatures of instinct. Something about breasts just grabs me at a primordial level and won’t let go. Why is that? In other mammals, breasts aren’t even visible most of the time, popping out only when a female is lactating and then retracting when she’s through. If anything, the sight of protruding breasts is a turn off, telling all males that this female is already carrying someone else’s baby or nursing a newborn, conditions that tend to prevent or reduce her fertility.

Humans are different. From puberty on, our females always display their mammary glands whether or not they’re nursing. In other animals, this condition would prevent a female from mating. With us, it’s essential for mating. Why?

Do permanently visible breasts work better than retractable breasts? Not at all; a woman’s breast size has nothing to do with her milk production. When you’re looking at a breast, you’re looking at fat, exquisitely shaped fat, but fat nonetheless. If anything, the fat can get in the way of milk production and make it more difficult for the baby to latch on. In addition to being useless, permanently visible breasts are also potentially harmful, their bouncy design slowing women down, making it more difficult for them to outrun predators, and their high fat content sucking up an inordinate share of a woman's precious calories. So why visible breasts?

If women don’t need them, then it must be because men respond to them. But why do men salivate at the sight of breasts?

Is it our fond memories of nursing at our own mother’s breasts? Not only is that disgusting, it’s wrong. I don’t remember anything that far back and, even if I did, if suckling as an infant is all it takes to create a lifelong lust for breasts, why don’t women develop a similar lust for breasts? They suckled just as much as we did. And why do men raised on formula still seek out breasts? This explanation doesn’t make any sense.

Maybe breast fat is the key. Women need more body fat than men, and when they don’t have it, they don’t ovulate and they won’t lactate. A woman with visible breasts is more likely to be fat enough to reproduce. Or at least look that way. Maybe our male ancestors evolved a preference for rotundity that eventually overwhelmed their aversion to visible breasts. Or maybe most males didn’t prefer visible breasts, but the few that did were more likely to sire more children, their mates being fatter, on average, and after hundreds of thousands of years of superior fecundity their children would overwhelm the less fertile retracting breast people, populating the earth with girls who inherited their mothers’ visible breasts and boys who inherited their fathers’ preference for the visible breasts. Like me!

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Men like women with small waists because big waists say: "Baby (Already) On Board." So anything that makes a woman’s waist look smaller should increase her perceived fertility, which should increase her desirability, which in turn should increase her success at finding a mate and procreating. And what makes a woman’s waist look smaller? Large visible breasts, of course. This may also explain why women's butts tend to be so big. It’s all about that hourglass figure.

Speaking of butts, here’s another theory. We are the only primates who mate face-to-face. The others all do it doggy style (or primate style, I suppose). Men who preferred face-to-face sex were more likely to fall in love with their mates, as it’s not as easy to share kisses, meaningful looks and sweet nothings while facing your partner’s back. Men who love their women are more likely to provide for them, which means their women will be fatter and more fertile and make more kids. And their lovestruck men would work harder to raise these kids, investing significant time and effort in part to please their mate. And this would ensure that more of these love children survived and passed on their inherited preference for face-to-face sex, which after a few millennia would ensure that they crowded out the few remaining rear-entry stalwarts. What does this have to do with breasts? Well, in the old days when our primate ancestors always entered from the rear, what do you think those primate males lusted after? Butts. Not only is that the part of the female they associated most with mating, it’s also, in most primates, the area that swells and turns red when a female’s in heat. Primate males who respond to this fertility-driven butt stimuli are more likely to mate successfully, so even after newly bipedal humans evolved the ability to have face-to-face sex, most of the human males probably retained their ages-old primate-derived preference for round red swollen butts. What would convince them to ditch this preference and turn her over? What if their female developed permanently visible breasts, breasts with cleavage designed to look like a butt crack, breasts that were large and round and wiggly and swollen with red spots at the tip? Maybe this butt/breast similarity is what got them over their aversion to visible breasts, maybe it is what convinced them to give face-to-face a try, and maybe this is what enabled them to perform in that unfamiliar position with its stimulating simulation of the time-honored butt view bouncing about during the deed. Call this the Booty/Booby Theory, or the Cleavage/Crack Conversion, or just call it cracked, either way as I sit here salivating over mammary glands, my instinctive desires fired by a pair of useless bags of fat, I think it may take a strange theory to explain my strange behavior.

“What do you think of the proposal? Looks like you’re giving this a lot of thought.”

Every face is staring at me.

“Still thinking,” I say, as I look down and grab my pen and hold it over my pad and wait for them to say something I can write down and demonstrate my attentiveness when I recall the Revenge of the Nerds Theory. That might explain it.

It all starts with the dominant male model, a winner-take-all system in which the dominant male gets to mate with all the women. This is a good system for enhancing genetic fitness, breeding only the fittest males with all the females, weeding out the pencil-necked geeks. For this reason it is very common in the animal world, especially among primates who live in social groups, much like our own ancestors. Somewhere along the line we ditched the dominant male model in favor of our one-on-one breeding model. (Except in Saudi Arabia and Utah.) Why? I don’t know, but for whatever reason the one-on-one model must work better for humans, so over time it replaced the dominant male model. And this where the nerds come in. If you’re the dominant male, you can mate with anyone. Who will you choose? Only the most fertile women, of course. You reason that women with visible breasts are more likely to be pregnant, and thus poor candidates for further reproduction until their breasts retract, so you concentrate your energies on flat-chested women with retracted breasts. You lavish attention on these runway models, jealously guarding them from the advances of other males. But you can’t be everywhere at once, and you can’t support every female, let alone every kid, so to keep it manageable you might neglect or cast aside the visibly breasted women. This gave the nerds their chance. Either because they had no alternative, or because, being nerds, they were better able to comprehend that visible breasts didn’t always mean infertility, the nerds swooped in and mated with the visibly-breasted women. And maybe the nerds, not having to divide their time and share their resources with a harem full of women and their children, were able to lavish time and attention on these visibly breasted women and their children, which produced more surviving children and, over time, bred a race filled with visibly breasted women and the nerds who love them. Like me!

They're leaving. I glance up, then towards the door, but the breasts are already gone. Deflated, I gather my things, get up and trudge back to my office, NSFW thoughts still bouncing about in my head.