Just Dessert

I gave up dessert for Lent. It was going well until I made a cake for a Lenten luncheon. People were giving up crystal meth to get a piece of that cake. I didn’t eat any, but I’d already licked the spoon, of course.

And that doughnut totally doesn’t count either, because that was a snack between meals, not a sweet following a meal. I didn’t give up snacks. But then there was that nice lunch where I completely forgot and ordered dessert; the server mentioned something about chocolate, but she had me at “hello.”

If Jesus fell off the cross, wouldn’t He get back on?

Chocolate comes from the ancient Mayans. Everyone knows that, and if you don’t, then your clue phone has voicemail. While chocolate was around at the time of Christ, I’m not sure chocolate was around Him. That connection between Central America and the Middle East hadn’t hit the Internet yet. Jesus did not give us an unequivocal ruling on chocolate at the Sermon on the Mount.

Is chocolate a sin?

I am only sampling the sacrifice of Christ. The enlightenment I have received so far is this: why do Girl Scout cookies always arrive within forty days of Easter? Actually I’ve found without dessert, I reduced snacking overall. I’m not sure how that’s linked to dessert, but it must be good for me.

I’ve learned not to wear pantyhose on Easter Sunday. I get up early and sing a double service, polishing off high notes I haven’t used since Christmas. Then I shall get my just dessert: Easter brunch. (I’m not sure how that qualifies as “brunch” served at two, but there’s omelets, so I guess it does.)

WWJD? He certainly wouldn’t wear pantyhose. I’m pretty sure Jesus did not wear pantyhose on Easter, or any other day. It’s an example of Christ I can easily follow; chocolate, not so much.

Kafuffle

"Do you think of a thought?" Dme Judi Dench questions on the British comedy As Time Goes By. That is the question indeed! What is the brain really for if insight is the real deal?

I think the brain is for mundane tasks. The brain stores building units for the shazaam, but doesn't produce the shazaam. You have a thought; you don't create them. Thoughts occur to you, but do not follow a logical link backwards through inductive or deductive reasoning. Hard to draw a flow chart that describes how you came to a bit of insight. Rather more like wandering a foreign city, lost, then coming down a dark alley to enlightenment on unretraceable steps.

"Kafuffle" is not a word I made up. I heard it on that same episode of As Time Goes By; however, you also won't find it in Wikipedia or the OED. (Not yet.) Furthermore, I believe it cannot be found in a Hebrew word search as well. Thus I feel we are witnessing the dawn of a new word, a new word to describe a new thought, and I wanted to add my contribution to the kafuffle.

Or maybe it’s British.

Evil Sudoku

Sudoku is the number one most irritating puzzle on the face of this planet. That’s why I’m addicted to it.

Let me first say how big a fraud Sudoku is in the puzzle-making business. It lacks the sophistication of a crossword, where someone has to think up questions or clues, fit them with answers, then fit the answers in a clever pattern, often with a theme. Sudoku is stupid nine numbers in a cube, nine by nine. The questions and answers are the same in every puzzle! Furthermore, it’s completely logically based, which means no human ever has to touch puzzle generation, AND there’s A FINITE NUMBER OF POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS (a number I’m sure a computer could pronounce). The concept is so ridiculously fragile it is insane that Sudoku could be at all challenging—which is what makes it so irritating!

You are driven to find the solution, not just to the puzzle you’re working on, but to seek a universal set of rules, a code book which would unlock EVERY Sudoku puzzle.

Pairing is important. Take a three by three cube and only write down the possibilities that come in pairs. Look for “covalent bonds,” my term for two pair of numbers that fall in the same two squares within a mini cube. Covalent bonds bump all other possibilities out of those two cubes. They are especially useful if the two squares align with a column or row. Probably you know this already.

Once you define the covalent bonds, work the puzzle again and look for new gimmies. This is simple stuff.

When you’re stuck again, try to balance the puzzle. Look for where a significant twin in one mini cube matches a significant twin in another mini cube along the same row or column. Think about squares that are pivot points, and which significant numbers are more important than others. That’s the tricky part.

When I buy a new puzzle book, I start in the “diabolical” section and work backwards. By the time I get to the beginning of “hard,” it’s just busy work without thought. I have my personal pitfalls, though. Six is hard for me to see apparently; I’ve noticed that if I’m going to mess up anywhere, it will be with a number six. And I can significantly handicap myself with alcohol; even the bunny slope grids are hard for me to complete after only one beer.

So this makes me ask myself, could I beat all puzzles if I truly concentrate? Or is it like lobbing in tennis with me? I can squarely play against an opponent with a low return; however, an opponent who lobs to me every time will defeat me. It’s not because the lobber is a better player; it is because I will wear myself out always running after the ball to return it with force. That is simply a strategy I cannot beat. Are there Sudoku solutions I cannot beat because of me who I am?

Here is my new principle: In a naturally balanced grid, where all open squares have paired possibilities except for one square with three possibilities, the most insignificant of the triple is the answer to that square.

If you think too hard, you can completely balance every grid. It is very logical and feels right, but then you cannot solve the puzzle. If you force balance the grid, you corner yourself into making an irrational decision that will not be correct. The grid is based on nine squares, an odd number, and therefore must be unbalanced in order to solve. You have to make that logical decision as to where it will be unbalanced, then the puzzle is yours.

Any Sudoku player knows that if you start finding answers quickly and if the puzzle suddenly becomes easy, then you’ve done something wrong and you’re soon going to meet yourself putting the same number in a row, column or mini-cube. That’s why I have confidence in my new principle. I can only test it on Saturday or Sunday puzzles, and I haven’t had enough naturally balancing occurrences to say my solution is FDA approved. I’m going to have to disprove my new principle slowly, but the slowness has its appeal. If I solve Sudoku as a whole with a complete set of universal rules, then I’d have to take up Cribbage.

Murakami Three Books In

Thoughts on Murakami three books in:

He is like a literary Steven King, but I think I mean that more as a compliment to Steven King than Murakami, in this way: Steven King still wrestles with story. He still wrestles with plot details and plausibility and suspension of disbelief and even, for the most part, a coherent narrative. In that way King is a traditional storyteller, whereas Murakami doesn't seem to be bothered with any of these basic constraints of Story. Murakami is perfectly content to hint at a hundred things and not deliver. He is perfectly content to leave out whole chunks of the traditional story arc (motive, conflict, resolution) where and when it suits him, as long as he gets close to some psychological or philosophical point. And he doesn't seem to need even to nail down these points; getting close is good enough. Having said all that I have no doubt that the translation from Japanese has a profound effect on my experience of the work and I'm certain that it reads better in the original.

He is not a stylist: Again this could have plenty to do with the translation and the cultural differences, but Murakami is still nobody's stylist. There's nothing wrong with simple, of course, but the similes and metaphors one finds in Murakami's fiction are rarely illuminative and too often the descriptive passages are either truncated or overstay their welcome. The dialog is effective but often prefaced on a kind of absurd dialectic model in which the characters immediately disagree with one another about something and then work to resolve it over the course of several long conversations. The tension at work in the dialog certainly does hook the reader and make for the easy turning of pages, but after a while this device, employed with alarming consistency, becomes tiresome.

His knows how to fill a page. There are long descriptions of simple actions or sequences of action. Same for the food. Lots of eating, plenty of descriptive passages regarding the interiors of refrigerators and pantries, the preparations of omelettes and other meals. This contributes to an unhurried pace, but also makes the books seem twice as long as they should be.

He's an enjoyable read: Having said all the above, I find him interesting enough to keep on reading. He does something quite interesting with his characters: he unites their fate, quite explicitly, with the resolution of some inner conflict, some psychological lesson which they must learn. And he states the terms of this psychological lesson more or less explicitly, which induces the reader into a suspense that we've all experienced at some time or another, even if we haven't later remembered it or admitted it to ourselves: the struggle to remember and resolve some long-lost injury.

Winter

The things I can say in favor of cold weather include one, there’s no better time to feed kids something different. They’re hungry; they’ll eat anything. Two, good hair days, when the air is dry and my hair does what my stylist intended. In winter, I don’t look like I come from the tribe who doesn’t care how they look. And three, I don’t have to wear a heavy coat to survive air conditioning.

Beyond those three things, I find no use whatsoever for winter. If you want winter, move to Maine; otherwise, leave cold weather out of Florida. Where is Al Gore when you want him to be right? Global Warming is never there when you need it!

The Economy

My wife’s predilection for lighting fires at the first hint of cold weather was passed down from her father, who would rub his hands gleefully and begin the preparations for a log on the hearth as soon at the thermometer, affixed to the outside of his kitchen window, dropped below forty degrees. The condominium in which we are now living does not have a fireplace and my wife must content herself with turning the up the thermostat until the rooms begin to take on the hot fragrant feeling of a convalescent center. On Sunday, in order to escape the sweaty confines of the house, I took my son to the park. As he is only two it is sometimes difficult to keep him focused. By the time we’d gotten into our coats and I’d packed his bag with diapers and snacks he’d already forgotten our destination. As we were going along the sidewalk he decided that sitting on the curb and waving at the passing motorists would be a much more agreeable use of our time. I managed to get him into the car by dint of outrageous lies about space men and plumy-tailed dogs in need of rescue. As we were driving the short distance to the park he repeated several times, perhaps to establish it in his mind, that we were:
“Going to the park. Not with mommy. Just the boys.”
“That’s right.”
“Going to the park.
“Right.”
The day was brilliant and blustery, with small thin clouds blowing fast across the face of the sun. Despite the cold, the park was full; a group of families had set up plastic coolers on one of the picnic tables and the adults huddled together, eating, while the children screamed and shot baskets on the cement court. The high winds had discouraged all the tennis players and these courts stood empty, nets billowing in the gusts, but the swings were nearly full and the slides were sporadically traversed by shouting children. My son stood, arms hanging stiffly in his puffy jacket, and watched two older girls go backward down his favorite slide, giggling as they collapsed into the sand. They shot him quick pitiless glances but did not halt their play to ask him to join. I encouraged my son to mount the ladder to the slide but he only stood mutely and shook his head as if to throw off my voice. After he’d stood there for some time he looked up and said, “I want to go swing.”
“I thought you wanted to slide,” I said.
“No, no, no. No slide.” He swung his arms and cast anxious glances between the swings and the little girls who were now executing a tandem backward maneuver that left the first girl trapped and giggling at the end of the slide while the second crawled over her to plop into the sand.
We went to the swings. The more advanced swings were constructed with a black plastic band held between two chains. There was a long row of these, mostly occupied by children whose shrieks and vigorous arcs seemed reverberate in the cold air and then, further on, a row of swings that were shaped like little buckets with holes in the bottom through which a child could thrust its legs.
“Which one do you want?” I said.
“I want the buckets,” my son said, and then added, “I’m just a little boy.”
The bucket swings stood in the shadow of some gnarled oak trees. It was colder there. I zipped my jacket up against the wind. I pushed my son, increasing the thrust when he said, “I want to go high, daddy.”
At the end our little row was another father was pushing a little boy. The father wore a bright yellow sweatshirt with “Sea Rescue” printed on the chest in sober black letters. The hood was pulled over his shaved brown head and his face, prematurely wizened and fixed in a sympathetic and skeptical grimace, peered out at a tall man in a black coat. They were talking about the economy. The man in the black coat, hands trust into pockets, nodded his head as he expounded on credit cycles and population growth and the benefits of solar power. He had an avuncular air which the man in the yellow sweatshirt seemed to vaguely resent but which he tolerated due to the gravity of the subject.
“I teach gym and rescue, and I am part time on the fire department,” the man in yellow finally interjected, his thick eyebrows going up. “So I could be on the chopping block but I don’t think so.”
“Nobody is safe,” the taller man said, leaning against the metal support of the swing set. “But your employment portfolio, as it were, is diversified, so that’s good.”
The smaller fellow nodded and let his eyes drift to the tossing canopy of oak branches. ‘I just wish I was full time, then I’d be safe.”
“Nobody is safe.”
“I’m just not going to worry about it. What can I do?”
“Nothing,” the taller man said. “Nothing to be done.”
The man in the yellow sweatshirt nodded thoughtfully and then, putting a finger over one of his arched nostrils, he blew forcefully. With a small pop a tan wad of mucus was expelled from his unplugged nostril and made a small rustling sound as it struck the oak leaves near the tall man’s foot.
My son, perhaps sensing my gaze, looked down the row of swings and, seeing the little boy being pushed by the man in the yellow sweatshirt, said, “Look, that boy is in a bucket swing too, daddy.”
I affirmed that this was true. My son seemed to feel better. I hadn’t known that all along he’d been suffering his own mild anxiety over his choice of the bucket swings and, without any idea how to ease his mind on this subject I stopped his swing and made him submit to a hug.
Later the slides were abandoned by the screaming horde; their parents packed up the coolers while the children swirled about the cars until they were slowly absorbed and driven away. Then my son went over and spent some time climbing and sliding on his own. When he was halfway down the slide he would thrust his arms tentatively in the air and then drop them quickly to touch the plastic rails. I thought about those men, talking about the economy. They were afraid just like everyone. Our little family had perhaps been lucky so far but we were saddled with crushing debt. The first two houses in which we’d lived had fireplaces but in order to service our debt we’d moved into a condominium with no fireplace and now my wife turned up the heat. She was grateful to have a place to live but she was suffering because she was disconnected now from her father, who had passed away. She connected to him through these little rituals and those rituals were being taken away. I thought about my son’s anxiety over his choice of the bucket swing. And it seemed to me in that windswept afternoon that I knew my wife and son intimately and I thought that sorrow allows us to touch, if only for a moment, the inner life of another.