love

Wright’s Law, and the Power of Love

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Jeffrey Wright is a well-known teacher at Louisville Male Traditional High School in Louisville, Kentucky. He is known for his antics teaching physics, which include exploding pumpkins, fireballs, hovercraft, and a bed of nails with a sledgehammer.

But it is a simple lecture, one without props, that leaves the greatest impression on his students each year. The talk is about Mr. Wright’s son and the meaning of life, love, and family.

In the video below, Mr. Wright gives a lecture on his experiences as a parent of a child with special needs. His son, Adam (12 years old) has a rare disorder called Joubert syndrome, in which the part of the brain related to balance and movement fails to develop properly. Visually impaired and unable to control his movements, Adam breathes rapidly and doesn’t speak.  Find twelve minutes in your life and watch this film:

 

Perhaps the biggest testament of Mr. Wright’s message is that the film was created by a former student of Mr. Wright’s named Zack Conkle. Said Zack: “I wanted to show people this guy is crazy and really amazing.”

An incredible story. And what a way to start 2013. Love. Pay it forward.

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(via New York Times; hat tip: Jonathan Fields)

Fiona Apple’s Poignant Letter about Her Dying Dog

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Last week, singer/song-writer Fiona Apple posted a handwritten letter addressed to “a few thousand friends I have not met yet.” In the letter, Fiona Apple announced that she is postponing the South American leg of her tour because of the ill health of her beloved dog, a pit bull named Janet. Janet is a 13-year-old rescue dog suffering from Addison’s disease (as well as a tumor on her chest), and Fiona Apple, acknowledging the inevitable, wants to be there for Janet’s final breath.

Fiona Apple’s heartbreaking letter to her fans.

The letter is one of the best things I’ve read ever read on the love humans have for dogs. A must-read in its entirety, presented below:

It’s 6pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I’m writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here’s the thing.

I have a dog, Janet, and she’s been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it’s always really been just the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.

Despite all this, she’s effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught me what love is.

I can’t come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.

She doesn’t even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.

But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can’t leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable & comforted & safe & important.

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life that keeps us feeling terrified & alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I’m asking for your blessing.

I’ll be seeing you.

Love, 

Fiona

What a testament to Fiona Apple’s character. These are words to live by: “I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.”

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(via Letters of Note)

Do What You Love

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Dan Shipper on doing what you love:

What you love is very often not something that you feel immediate passion for. It doesn’t smack you in the face after 10 minutes and tell you that this is something you’re going to do for the rest of your life. That happens only very rarely, or in the movies. 

Love doesn’t start out as a hurricane that sweeps through your life and changes everything in an instant. It starts out as a seed. Barely alive, easily overlooked, fragile and small. But given attention love grows. Given proper care it sprouts and springs up through the dirt. Given years to blossom it buds flowers and grows branches, snaking its way through your life until it consumes it entirely. Given enough care the thing that you love becomes the lens through which you see the world. 

But it’s so easy to miss because it starts out as something so tiny. It starts out as something that you did without even realizing it. When you’re bored on a Saturday afternoon, your friends aren’t around, and you’re looking for something to do. Maybe you sit down and play piano. Maybe you write on your blog. Maybe you fire up TextMate and start coding. 

Everyone has something like this. And even though it may not look like it, that is the seed of love. Because it may start as something that you just do when you’re bored. But given attention and time you start to get better at it. You start to figure out the ins and outs, to gain skill. You probably don’t even notice that this is happening.

Dan reasonably argues that to do something you love, you have to come to terms with the following questions: What is love? How do I find what I love? How do I know if I love something?

It’s a process.

How an Economist Says “I Love You”

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes this brilliant post on how economists say “I love you.” Some of my favorites:

1) The marginal returns of spending time with you will never diminish.

2) The monopoly you have on my heart is all natural.

3) For what you’re supplying, my demand’s inelastic.

Inelastic demand for your love.

See the entire post here.

The Superpower of Being Alone

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I stumbled upon “My Superpower is Being Alone Forever” in the Awl after perusing the best #longreads chosen by Edith Zimmerman, a writer and co-editor of The Hairpin. Joe Berkowitz writes about online dating, its repercussions, and why some of us are still single:

Putting together a dating profile means performing a self-autopsy and reassembling the pieces into Sexy Robocop. You save what’s worth salvaging and shield the damaged parts with reinforced metal. You strive to find the middle ground between showing you have nothing to hide, and just showing off. You carefully curate your interests as if they were co-op displays in a Barnes & Noble, reveling in the understated complexity of liking both Nicki Minaj and My Bloody Valentine. Your picture gallery broadcasts a series of defensive messages: “See? Other females aren’t afraid of me.” “See? I go to museums sometimes and mimic sculpture-poses because Culture.” “See? I’ve been to a Halloween party so obviously I don’t spend much time alone, crying to The Cure’s Disintegration LP and drinking wine from a can.” Dating profiles reveal more about how you see yourself than how you really are, and more about how you want to be seen than how you will be.

With infinite choice comes infinite opportunities to judge. The more options that exist, the pickier you become. Scrolling through profile after profile, I am transformed into an imperial king, surveying his goodly townsfolk from a balcony on high. Those with minor perceived flaws are summarily dismissed (“Next!”) because surely someone closer to the Hellenic ideal is just around the corner. Anyone cute might be cast aside for the smallest breach of taste: a penchant for saying things like “I love life and I love to laugh” or self-identifying as “witty.” Yet even when I genuinely find myself attracted to someone, I’ll still react with skepticism. What’s the catch? What dark and terrible secret causes her to resort to this thing I am also doing? After scanning closely for red flags and finally deigning her regally worthy, I dispatch a message. But then the truth reveals itself: the king is not her type and also he is not really a king.

No piece on online dating would be complete without a mention of OKCupid:

Everyone has a friend who is so charismatic, brilliant or good-looking that the idea of him or her trolling OKCupid is mind-boggling. I am haunted by those friends. What is it that separates us? Is it gluten? I’m at peace with the fact that Drake sings about how jaded he is from being constantly propositioned by beautiful women—because Drake is crazy-famous. My friends who’d never be mistaken as online daters are not famous, but they also possess some ineffable quality that makes them forever F-able. As far as our social sphere is concerned, they might as well be Drake (or nearest female equivalent): They’re stars, and finding them on a dating site would create cognitive dissonance of Orwellian proportions. Personally, I’ve never felt as spectacularly anonymous as I have as an online dater, united with everyone else on the site in that we all have a reason to be there. I can rationalize about Internet dating for days. I can think up reasons for why the way my grandparents met is outmoded. But I don’t want any woman to think she was my last resort, and I don’t want to imagine that I was hers. When we say, “I’m so glad we found each other,” I don’t want it to refer to the way we had to find each other like hidden files in a hard-drive search.

I highly recommending clicking over to the original article to see Joanna Neborsky’s wonderful illustrations accompanying the piece.

Why Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

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Jonah Lehrer has a post summarizing the research behind the infamous “nice guys finish last” proclamation:

In 1948, the legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher declared that “nice guys finish last.” Although Durocher would later deny the quote, his pithy line summarizes a popular and pessimistic take on human nature. When it comes to success, we assume that making it to the top requires ethical compromises. Perhaps we need to shout and scream like Steve Jobs, or cut legal corners like Gordon Gekko: the point is that those who win the game of life don’t obey the same rules as everyone else. And maybe that’s why they’re winning.

Well, it turns out Durocher and all those pessimists were right: nice guys really do finish last, or at least make significantly less money. According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Beth A. Livingston of Cornell, Timothy A. Judge of Notre Dame, and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario, levels of “agreeableness” are negatively correlated with the earnings of men.

Let’s begin by defining our terms. There are six facets to agreeableness: trust, straightforwardness, compliance, altruism, modesty and tender-mindedness. Those are all nice character traits, right? Why would someone lacking those traits have a competitive edge in the workplace?

To understand why niceness might be a disadvantage, it helps to understand the essence of disagreeableness. Because being disagreeable doesn’t mean you behave like Ari Gold. It doesn’t mean you are a sociopath or intentionally inflict pain on others. Instead, those on the disagreeable spectrum are generally pretty decent folks, described by their peers as mostly amiable. However, these disagreeable people do consistently exhibit one special trait: they are willing to “aggressively advocate for their position during conflicts.” While more agreeable people are quick to compromise for the good of the group – conflict is never fun – their disagreeable colleagues insist on holding firm. They don’t mind fighting for what they want.

So guys who are “agreeable” tend to lose in getting that pay raise or promotion. But it’s not all bad news:

A new study points out that kindness is the single most salient variable that women look for when choosing a significant other. (Not surprisingly, those looking for a quick fling care most about looks.) So being agreeable won’t make you rich. But it just might help you fall in love, which will make you much happier than a marginal boost in income.

That is interesting. So do nice guys finish last? In some aspects yes. But as the latest research goes to show, perhaps it balances out in the end.

A Remarkable Wedding Story

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“We have each lived a nightmare…Now it’s time to live our fairy tale.” 

I don’t usually post wedding stories on this blog, but this story that appeared this weekend in the Vows section of The New York Times is just incredible.

Sonia Jacobs, 64, and Peter Pringle, 73, married in New York last week…Their common ground was the decade and a half each had served on death row before their convictions were overturned for the murders that they steadfastly maintained they did not commit.

Definitely not a story you read every day.

Notes from a Dragon Mom

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A heartbreaking piece from a mother whose son, Ronan, is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease; unfortunately, the child isn’t expected to live much past his third birthday…

Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

This just tugs at you… It’s about living in the present:

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. I can see my reflection in his greenish-gold eyes. I am a reflection of him and not the other way around, and this is, I believe, as it should be. This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.

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