Totalizing Systems

You might believe that God rules the universe, that every action occurs according to God’s will, that all decisions can be judged according to whether or not they comply with God’s prescribed set of morals, as described in the Bible.

You might believe that nothing exists outside of your own mind, that only your own thoughts are known to you, that everything else is an illusion created by your own psyche. Or you may believe that it is impossible to know for certain whether anything beside your own mind exists; and therefore, you will treat everything outside your own mind as though it does not exist, just to be safe.

You might believe that the laws of physics determine every action in the universe, including your actions, movements, thoughts. If you decide to jump off a bridge, it is because of electric signals in your brain set into motion at the time of your conception. If your psychiatrist convinces you not to jump off the bridge, her words, the thoughts that gave rise to them, your thoughts and actions in response to her words were all effects of the physical interactions of particles in your brains and bodies and in the universe around you, and all of this was determined at the beginning of time and cannot be changed any more than we can change the force of gravity.

When I was in college, I discovered a totalizing system that saved me from being stuck with the B grades that seemed to be my perpetual fate in my chosen major, English. When I started studying English, I wasn’t sure exactly how the graduate students who graded my essays wanted me to analyze works of literature. I would try to make causal arguments about the characters’ actions, or discuss the psychological distinctions between two characters. My graders were never impressed; they didn’t agree with my premises or the conclusions I was drawing from them.

Then I discovered a field of study that I was really, really good at: linguistics. And I figured out that the study of language could be applied readily to analyzing literature, because literature is nothing but language. I discovered that a whole tradition of structuralist and post-structuralist literary critics agreed with me, approaching literary texts as an assemblage of words and sentences, descriptions and metaphors, not as hypothetical worlds populated by imaginary people.

This strategy of interpretation became my doctrine, and it saved me from all the inane disagreements about character motivation that I had had with my graduate student instructors. Characters had no motivations, because the characters did not exist. No one could argue with this fact. One professor, my senior thesis advisor, would actually shoot me a guilty, apologetic look every time she made a statement like, “Hardy implies that Tess of the D’Urbervilles was raped, but a lot of readers think she really wanted to have sex with Alec.” She did not need to voice her acknowledgment aloud: Tess of the D’Ubervilles doesn’t want anything, except in the sense that Thomas Hardy’s narrator says that she wants it—she is nothing but a collection of words and descriptions, not a real person who can act in defiance of the author who created the illusion that she exists.

This approach to literary analysis seemed to be objection-proof. I wrote an essay about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that compared the similes used in the first half of the giant novel (comparisons to concrete objects) to those used in the second half (comparisons to abstract ideas). I invented some explanation of what this change meant, relating it to the novel’s themes of self-doubt and self-acceptance. I wrote this essay during the five hours before it was due; I was taking the class pass-fail, so my grade didn’t really matter.

I got an A, and some gushing commentary from my graduate student reader about what a solid analysis I had achieved. I knew why my grade was high: there was no easy way to argue against my analysis. I had carefully documented examples of similes from beginning to end; and who would want to bother going back into that giant tome to verify that the pattern I had identified was correct? By focusing on purely linguistic elements, which are the only factual truths about literature, I made myself invincible as a literary critic. Everything I wrote in college from this point on got a grade of A or even A+, all focusing on language-based truths that were impractical or impossible to refute.

I liked this newfound power—the power to wield a system that I had mastery of, one that impressed and confounded my professors, one that could be used equally on any text, because, ultimately, they were all cut from the same cloth, just a bunch of language.

By the time I got to graduate school, this way of thinking had gotten pretty old. Of course the characters didn’t really have motivations. Of course they didn’t have histories, families, futures, identities. But I was ready to write about those things again, anyway, illusory though they were, because they comprise the meaning of literature, and it occurred to me that I did not want to spend the rest of my career ignoring the point of what I was analyzing just to be invulnerable to criticism.

The idea that literature is nothing more than language was the first and last totalizing theory that I ever subscribed to. It isn’t a theory that applies to everything in the entire universe, as a true totalizing theory would. But it applied universally to every work of literature—in fact, to every written or spoken text.

Since the time I gave up my own theory, I have found myself on the wrong side of a number of others. One semester, I had a student who used to come to my office hours every few weeks to debate with me about Christianity, which he was a strong believer in; in fact, he was training to be a minister. I normally wouldn’t engage in religious debates with anyone, much less my student, but he was a strong and interesting debater and I liked hearing what he had to say.

“My moral system is absolute,” he would say to me. “I believe morality comes from God, so I can always defend my values and beliefs. If you believe that your morals are defined by your society, you have to accept that other societies have different morals. How are you going to tell them that it’s wrong to commit murder?”

He was right, of course: it is a messy process to make any moral argument when morality is relative. Your argument is likely to contradict itself at times, or end up anchoring itself in absolutes (“it is wrong to cause suffering”) that cannot be proven any more than my student can prove that God doesn’t want us to murder people. This is the nice thing about totalizing systems; they’re tidy and consistent and avoid hypocrisy.

The issue of absolute versus relative morality arises whenever we discuss conservative and liberal politics in my English classes. Conservatives know what they believe, and state it outright: We are for big-business. We are against abortion. We believe America is the greatest country on earth, and we support traditional American values.

Liberals tend not to state concrete beliefs, but rather systematic principles: We might not agree with what you say, but we will defend your right to say it. We are pro-choice (not pro-abortion). We believe it is important to respect other people’s beliefs.

Predictably, the conservative position is internally consistent, while the liberal one is conflicted. How can we justify respecting other people’s religions and cultures, except when they fundamentally disagree with our own values? Theocracy is okay; preventing women from getting an education is not okay. Communism is okay; suppressing the free speech of your opponents is not okay. Of course, in these cases, the values that are violated are part of what we call human rights, values we hold so sacred that we don’t even see them as values but self-evident morals. Which I believe we should, but I can’t explain that belief through recourse to any absolute morality. If someone asks me why I hold those values to be self-evident, I will ultimately have to respond that I just do. And that, of course, is a horrible basis for an argument.

If we wish to avoid such messiness, we must believe all sorts of counterintuitive things that will make consistency out of a messy world: that there is a god who cares deeply about our dietary habits and who we have sex with; that America is the greatest country on earth; that all of our actions and thoughts can be predicted by the laws of physics. These beliefs are orderly, and once we have embraced them, we will never be lost, illogical, confused, or frightened again.

Going First

Someone I know recently died in an accident. It wasn’t the kind of accident that occurs during normal activities everyone does every day, like driving or showering or walking down the street. It also wasn’t the kind of accident that results from an activity so risky that no one is surprised when it goes wrong, something like white-water kayaking or flying an “experimental aircraft.”

My friend died doing something both dangerous and mundane, the kind of thing that makes parents declare that their children are trying to get themselves killed. He died from a skateboarding accident. He crashed his skateboard, hit his head, was in a coma for a long time, and then finally, just when chances for his eventual recovery had started to look up, he died.

Besides his death being incredibly sad on its own, it bothered me a lot that he had died skateboarding. Something about it seemed like suicide to me, like he had chosen to die on purpose. I couldn’t figure out why I felt this way. After all, he skateboarded everywhere, all the time. There couldn’t have been anything special about the day when he crashed; it was probably just an ordinary day, until things went horribly wrong. But I couldn’t get rid of this creepy feeling that he knew it was coming, that it was planned somehow.

I tried to shake the idea that there was some underlying significance to all this, that it was the end to some kind of parable or puzzle or syllogism.

“I suppose it could have been anything,” I said to a friend of his. “It could have been a car accident.”

“No,” said the friend, shaking his head vehemently. “It’s important that it was a skateboarding accident.”

That’s how I felt, too, but I didn’t like what this interpretation suggested. It meant that it wasn’t random, not a freak accident, that his death had meant something. But what could it mean, other than a referendum against the kind of life that we were all living, lives full of small dangers, unnecessary risks, hobbies and habits we all convince ourselves are safe, or safe enough?

Our friend was a brave guy. That’s one of the qualities that always struck me most about him. Without a hint of apprehension, he would do all kinds of things that to me seemed pretty scary: travel to China to study kung fu, practice crazy jumping back flips, spar on a raised platform with no protective gear, move to Guatemala on a moment’s notice when his ailing mother needed help, and, regularly, get on his skateboard and fly down Monte Vista, a street so steep it’s difficult to walk down without stumbling.

I had often been inspired by his bravery. When he returned from China during a time that I had been feeling ambivalent about sparring, the stories of his trip motivated me to face up to difficult challenges. Watching how easily he could pack up his life and travel, I reminded myself not to get too attached to my routines. If he can do it, I would tell myself, it must not be so bad.

His death reminded me of another one that occurred five years ago, when my coworker’s sixteen-year-old daughter flew off her dirt bike, which she was riding with her father, and suffered a fatal injury to one of her internal organs. I didn’t know her very well, but after she died, I learned she was another brave person, someone who, like my friend, inspired people around her to try to be braver themselves.

Just after she died, her mother told me that her friends were keeping her MySpace page as a memorial, and when I went to look at it, in addition to about a thousand heartbreaking messages from distressed teenagers, I saw her brief self-description, which included this:

I love my dirt bike, even though I seem to fall off it all the time!

The eerie foreshadowing of these words chilled me when I read them. Could she have known, I asked myself? As with my skateboarding friend, I imagined for a moment that she had chosen her death, or that it had been somehow fated. It just seemed so unlikely that she would specifically mention the falling off; why would she say that, if she hadn’t anticipated what it would come to mean?

Then I thought about the potential for creepy omens on my own online presences: so many jokes about getting beat up, getting hit in the face, so many pictures of injuries and bruises. It seems impossibly far-fetched that any of this would lead me to serious physical harm, just as the falls must have seemed reasonably safe to her. And they were; she was just really, really unlucky in how she fell. We can all be unlucky, whether getting thrown by a dirt bike or kneed a little too hard in the face or hit by a runaway bus as we cross the street. So it’s back to the car accident comparison. Are these deaths, which seem so particularly haunted, the result of the same kind of wrong-place-wrong time bad luck that causes people to die on the freeway or in the shower?

Is that the only lesson, I wondered, as I thought about these two deaths? That same old lesson we’ve always known, that you never know when it will be your time to go, that it can happen any time, in any way, for seemingly no reason at all? And if the brave people go and get killed doing things that are supposed to be safe, what lesson does that teach the rest of us? The implied message seems to be that maybe it’s not a good idea to be so brave—but that’s hardly an acceptable lesson to take from the lives of people who inspired those around them to be adventurous and take risks.

I looked back at the girl’s MySpace page this week, which would have been her twenty-first birthday. I saw that her friends are still writing notes to her on it, five years later. They tell her about their problems, and tell her that she is an inspiration to them, how they think of her as they enter scary new phases of their lives, starting college, moving away from home, dating. Some of them say that they imagine her as she would be now, as a young adult, and they look to her for wisdom about decisions in their own lives.

I reread her self-description and saw something I had missed last time. Below the part about falling off her dirt bike, it said that she loved softball and basketball, and, she noted, that she loved to play “full contact—it’s more interesting that way!” If I saw those words five years ago, I didn’t remember them, though if her accident had occurred during one of those sports, these words would have seemed as foreboding as the ones about her dirt bike. It turns out, she wasn’t psychic regarding her own untimely demise. She was just a brave girl who loved to do scary, exhilarating things, just as my skateboarding friend did.

The lesson I will keep with me from my friend is the same lesson I always learned from him, which is to be brave. I though at first that his death negated this message in some way, that it showed that taking risks does not pay off. But now, like the young adults seeking strength and guidance from their friend’s memory on MySpace, I feel inspired by my friend’s memory to be braver, even about the prospect of my own death. My friend did so many things that I found terrifying, and when he did them, they came easily, fearlessly, effortlessly. Death is far less scary to me now that he has gone through it. I think to myself, if he did it, it must not be so bad.

Adam Caldwell's drawing of Joseph in the hospital.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Joseph and Monica, both greatly missed.

Wikipedia

The student looked at me with a mixture of horror and awe. “But…you’re a teacher,” he said. “I’ve never heard a teacher say that before.”

What did I tell this student that scandalized him so deeply? Did I tell him that school is useless and he might as well drop out and get a job? Did I invite him to smoke marijuana in the parking lot? Did I admit to him that I think that guy in the back row—you know, the one who spends all of class text-messaging—is a total fucking asshole?

No, in fact, what I did was advise him to look up some information on Wikipedia.

But teachers hate Wikipedia, my students say to me whenever I suggest that they use the site.

My students are correct. Teachers discuss Wikipedia with that same edge of sickly distain they direct at all the institutions that are destroying American intellectual life: Reality television. Video games. Christianity. You can just see them shudder a little as they say it.

Just last week I was at a meeting about information competency—in other words, how to find, evaluate, and use information—and the other teachers and librarians there were predictably bashing the online encyclopedia.

“We want students to know where to find good information,” said one teacher.

“Not Wikipedia,” said another. Everybody laughed.

“But there’s lots of good information on Wikipedia!” I said.

Everyone looked at me with patient tolerance, because they’re community college teachers and thus not allowed to show open scorn.

They explained grudgingly that Wikipedia is an okay place to start a research project but not good as a main source, a point that we could all easily agree with.

I know why teachers, and I suppose everyone else, makes fun of Wikipedia: because it’s unreliable. Of course it’s not a good source to cite for a research paper: the authors are anonymous and multiple so there is no accountability for the information in the articles, and incorrect information can be inserted accidentally or intentionally. But it’s a great starting place for all kinds of research projects.

It’s of course useful for finding the kinds of information that could also be found in a print encyclopedia:

I chose John Donne as the subject of my research paper because I really like one of his poems, but I don’t know anything about him—where do I start?

I’m supposed to write a paper on acupuncture, but I don’t even know what that is!

But Wikipedia’s extensiveness and inclusiveness also means it answers questions that would be difficult or impossible to find in a print reference source:

Our team is supposed to debate against Euthanasia, but all we can think of are religious arguments. Are there any other main arguments against assisted suicide?

Who were the pioneers of hardcore punk?

What kinds of awards are given for websites?

Wikipedia is great for finding out information such as this—information that is Internet or pop-culture related, that is very new or frequently changes, that depicts various conflicting viewpoints and thus might be seen as not objective enough for a traditional encyclopedia.

The ongoing ridicule of Wikipedia in American culture seems to me a deep form of self-hatred. I have to imagine that those mocking it still use it on a regular basis; even the librarians can’t be going to print encyclopedias or published articles every time they want to know a small piece of information like the capital of Mongolia or the year Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here came out. I’m an English teacher with the skills to find all kinds of “credible” information, and I use Wikipedia on a daily basis. I hear an interview with an actor or author on the radio; as I listen, I scan Wikipedia to discover what movies the actor was in or what books the author has written. I meet somebody from a country I don’t know much about; Wikipedia tells me a bit about the history and culture of that country. Of course, the information I find is not 100% reliable; but neither is the information in a print encyclopedia, which is certainly less up-to-date and is also prone to author-based error.

Critics of Wikipedia point to its democratic nature as evidence of its badness. They decry it as an affront to the idea of expertise, to the valuing of credible sources of information. But much, or hopefully all, of what can be found on Wikipedia is created by experts. My friend is a biologist with special expertise on a genetic cause of cystic fibrosis; she contributed heavily to the entry on this topic. Another friend used to be in a punk band; she contributed enough information about the band to turn its page from a minimal stub to a full-fledged article. Both of these friends are experts: one in biology, the other in the history of her own band. And in both cases, their respective entries would surely be far more informative, detailed, and factually correct than their counterparts in a traditional encyclopedia, if such articles even exist.

The first time I used Wikipedia was for my job. I was showing the movie Crash (disambiguation: the 2004 film about racial tension in Los Angeles, not the 1996 film about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents) in one of my classes. The class had a lot of students who were recent immigrants, and I anticipated that they would have difficulty following film’s heavy use of slang and American cultural references. I decided that handing out a packet including character descriptions and a scene-by-scene synopsis would help students understand the film; however, I did not want to write them myself. I looked all over the internet, but could only find brief overviews of the film’s plot.

Finally, about to give up, I clicked on that link at the top of my search results page, the link I had been ignoring not only during this search, but during the previous five years since it had first started appearing at the top of every search I did.

So this is the evil Wikipedia, I said to myself, as I scrolled down the page and found, to my delight, exactly what I had been looking for. I printed the page and copied it for my students, saving myself approximately two hours of scanning through the movie, writing down all the details of its plot and characters. Needless to say, I was thrilled, and I began touting the wonders of Wikipedia to my students the very next day, as I handed out photocopies to my students.

Even in this early encounter, rife as the page was with awkward sentence structure and typos, I was viewing the work of an expert: in this case, one or more people who saw the movie and had the patience to write down the plot, which was all the expertise I required.

I have loved Wikipedia ever since. What I love about it most is that it centralizes the knowledge of all of these different types of experts: the scientist, the band member, the movie fan. These experts are everywhere, laying low, not admitting or even knowing that they are experts. But if, ten minutes before class, I want a list of the characters in the movie we’re about to discuss, or if, at eleven at night, I get curious what spin-off bands were created by the members of Spitboy, they are the best experts I could ask for.

The Dorks

The dorks hang out in a small dining room off the the side of the Las Pecinas cafeteria. At any hour of the day you’ll find them there, filling up the little square tables across from the vending machines—dorks of all shapes and colors and ages and sizes.

It seems as though every table has at least one laptop; more often, there are several competing laptops, their owners conversing over the tops of their unfolded screens. But upon closer inspection one table does not bear a computer. The occupants of this table are spreading a colorful pack of ornate playing cards across its surface like a tarot reading.

They are debating loudly whenever I go in there. Their tone is urgent and impassioned, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. It’s heavy with dork jargon, like, “The way Voltaic Key works with the Phyrexian Colossus is classic,” or “For a good Tank who is watching the mana level of the Healer, it can be even MORE annoying because the DPS getting the group into combat again just further slows down the Healer from regaining mana and allowing the group to move forward with speed.” I sometimes try to memorize snippets of their conversations so I can investigate what it is that they are arguing about, but it’s like trying to recite a sentence in a language you’ve never heard before. By the time I get back to my office, the syllables in my head are all garbled and the words are out of order.

I love the dorks, and these showy debates are one of the main reasons. Las Pecinas is a college, yet the side room is one of the only places where I hear the sounds I associate with college, students obsessed with some intellectual principle, defending it with all the unwarranted zealotry of the newly converted.

I seldom hear this sort of fervor from the student body at large. As I traverse the campus, I pass homogeneous groups of students: three tall boys in basketball jerseys, two white girls in tight leggings and sheepskin boots, four Afghani women in headscarves. What I overhear of their conversations is seldom academic in nature, and never sounds like a debate. They are often talking about their plans for the weekend, whether they will go to the club. Or they are discussing one of their friends: I totally can’t stand her boyfriend! Often what I hear is offensive: What a retard! Dude, that’s so gay. I was like, if you’re not gonna learn English you should just go back to Mexico.

The most academic-sounding discussions I hear are when they assess their classes or teachers: That test was hella hard, or Yeah, my econ teacher’s okay but she’s kind of scattered. The most serious students seem to be accounting their progress through their course requirements: I have two more bio classes to go, and then I can transfer.

The odd times that I pass a student saying something like, I don’t know if I can support socialism, or But are people always entitled to freedom of speech, I want to hug the speaker, even if I disagree entirely with his or her views. You have an opinion, I want to congratulate them! Welcome to college!

It seems that many of the students at my school have some of that high-schoolish distance from what they are learning that is the hallmark of compulsory education. It is no wonder that students sometimes call Las Pecinas thirteenth grade. The students are sweet and earnest and hard-working, but they often seem to regard their courses as a series of hurdles rather than a body of information.

The subjects that the dorks are debating are not usually academic either, other than the occasional snippet of what sounds like computer science. But they are the closest thing that I regularly hear to that impassioned intensity of thought that to me means college.

The very fact that there are dorks, that this social category exists, that they can be located to one corner of the cafeteria, speaks to the high-schoolishness of my college. I always thought one of the best innovations of the transition into college is that the cliquey social distinctions of high school ease up. At a place where everyone is there to learn, ostracizing some people because they are too passionate about knowledge—because they discuss it too loudly, because the knowledge they enjoy is too esoteric—seems declassee.

In fact, it seems that being a dork is the very reason somebody should come to college. Isn’t college a place where people are supposed to care too much—about medieval history, the phonetic system of native African languages, distant corners of the galaxy, particles too small to be seen in a regular microscope? About transcendentalism, existentialism, Sufism, phenomenology? Shouldn’t all of the students be shouting loudly about something no one else understands, making fools of themselves? Shouldn’t the vending machine room extend beyond the walls of the cafeteria, through the library and the classrooms and the quads and the parking lots, to every place where there are college students?

Tea and Coffee

Today on the radio I heard a song about the decadent pick-up scene on tour after a rock concert. It includes these lyrics:

I’m just sipping on chamomile,
Watching boys and girls and the sex appeal.

I will be uncool enough to admit that I really like this line; I have several times listened to the entirety of the rather silly song just to hear it repeated in the chorus. It paints an image that is very familiar and very appealing to me: surrounded by lasciviousness, the singer is removed, her beverage a dowdy contrast to the flirtatious behavior around her.

This image makes me think about how I feel when I drink tea, which is something I do a lot—in fact, something I am doing right this very moment, and most of the moments I write this blog, which I usually do at a tea shop. It is fitting to drink tea while writing essays. Tea is about laying low, distance, contemplation. It is not aggressive; it is subtle and civilized. It is the drink of countries with kings and queens, or emperors, a drink that calls for a Zen garden to be designed around it, for a polite mid-afternoon snack to bear its name. It is the drink of calm tradition, of order and reason.

In the song, the singer is drinking herbal tea, which is not even really tea—this is the ultimate in contemplative detachment, not even an actual drug, just herbs steeped in water.

I drink tea every day, many times a day: strong black tea in the morning, astringent herbal teas throughout the day, grassy green tea at night when I need to keep working. Almost all of it is thin and light, neutral hot water stained so slightly with a tinge of vegetation.

The coffee I used to drink each morning was completely different. I would slap myself awake with its bitterness, like a scalding hot shower, the only thing sharp enough to cut through the haze of sleep. If you are addicted to coffee, it tastes like something you need. It has the richness of a blood tonic, thick and dark like beet juice, like a hot cup of bitter, slightly poisonous blood.

Tea is quiet about everything, including its cultural significance; it is easy to forget that it exists. Coffee, on the other hand, screams its significance with a voice as shrill as its harsh, bitter flavor. It is an icon, as overloaded with cultural meaning as chocolate and whiskey and wine. It represents the mind’s power to manipulate the body, to defy the body’s needs to for sleep and calmness and rest. It magnifies stress instead of relieving it. The fact that it is bad for us gives it a sense of nonconformity—and yet it is the sanctioned fuel that powers our culture of overwork, the one drug our employers will give us for free.

I stopped drinking coffee almost three years ago. My office-mate at work coincidentally stopped around the same time. But before that, she used to set her coffee maker to have a pot brewing as we walked in the door in the morning. I remember how the smell would hit us as we walked into the little office, how we would grab our cups and sink into our chairs and stare at our computers and groan, “Mmm, coffee.”

Now when I walk into the office, it smells like the little pots of tea she brews on the small industrial desk we use as a beverage cart. Often the office is steamy with lavender from her Earl Grey. I drink strong English Breakfast from tea bags. Everything is calm and manageable. We still need to drug ourselves into wakefulness and workfulness, but now we do so in a way that, we reason, is healthy, full of antioxidants, possibly prolonging our lives and keeping us from getting colds and infections—possibly. We are civilized, and we have grown up.

Needles

The other day I watched my friend Samantha get a tattoo. She got to talking with the tattoo artist about his clients’ various bad reactions to the tattooing process.

“I had one lady scream so much I had to stop working on her,” he said, guiding what looked like a small electric drill over the lines he had drawn in ink on her arm. His own arms were fully encased with twisting patterns of red and black. “She just kept yelling, ‘Fuck! It hurts so much!’ I was like, sorry, we can’t do this anymore.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Samantha. “I’m an acupuncturist.”

“Oh,” he said knowingly. “So you use needles, too.”

“Yeah, and I have a lady just like that,” she said. “Every time she sees me, she says, ‘You are not going to stick a needle right there.’ And I say, ‘Oh yes I am.’ I have to fight her about it every time. It doesn’t seem worth all the trouble.”

“Oh, but I would be like that, too,” said the tattoo artist. “I hate needles.”

Of course we laughed at him.

“I know, it sounds silly,” he said. “My doctor always makes fun of me when I don’t want to get a shot. He says, don’t you work with needles all day long? And I say, yeah, but not hypodermic needles.” He shuddered a little at his own mention of them.

“Yeah, actually, I hate them too,” said Samantha.

“I hate how long they are,” the tattoo artist said. “And what I especially hate is when they put them in sideways and you can see the needle sliding around under your skin.”

It’s a very human thing to be scared of things that puncture our skin. Most of the shots that we get don’t hurt that much—not any more than banging our heads or stubbing our toes, things we don’t live in terror of—but we just don’t like the principle of having things stuck into our flesh, ruining the illusion that our bodies are permanent and coherent manifestations of our souls and not a bunch of malleable matter, just like everything else.

My cat was not scared of shots at all. Whenever she had to get a shot at the vet, I expected her to cry and protest as the needle was inserted, but she would just look slightly nonplussed; her more violent objections were reserved for the rectal thermometer. When I had to give her subcutaneous fluids at the end of her life, I was far more disconcerted by the needle than she was. She would sit calmly once she resigned herself to the fact that I wouldn’t let her move around, which was the only thing bothering her about the procedure.

When I have to get a shot, however, I anticipate it nervously all day. I had to have a tetanus booster a few months ago, and I was sure it was going to be excruciatingly painful. My previous tetanus shot was fourteen years earlier, when I cut my foot on the filthy driveway of my apartment building. The next morning, at the university clinic, the nurse chastised me for not having come in as soon as I cut myself. Then she reopened the wound on my foot and spent five minutes flushing it out with a hypodermic needle the size of a turkey baster.

Then she gave me the tetanus shot. And then she told me that I looked like I was going to faint, and wouldn’t let me leave until I had consumed a packet of saltines and a little can of juice.

Preparing for my recent tetanus shot, I tried to discount this memory—it couldn’t have been as painful as I remember. But when I told a few coworkers that I was going to the hospital for a tetanus shot, they all said, Oh, I hate that one. That one hurts a lot. They rubbed their upper arms and winced as they remembered.

I was pretty shaky by the time I got to the hospital.

“Why are you so bruised?” the nurse asked me as I pulled up my sleeve to expose my arm. I had several purple spots on my upper arm from being grabbed, and a large round bruise on my bicep where someone’s heel had landed as I tried to catch her side kick.

I was tempted to make a joke about my boyfriend beating me, but then I remembered that I was at a hospital. “That’s from kickboxing,” I said.

“Well, be careful,” said the nurse, rubbing alcohol on my upper arm.

“I don’t like needles,” I told him, as he prepared to stick one into my arm, hoping that he would distract me with some conversation.

“Yeah, nobody likes this shot” he said. I felt a prick on my arm, the smallest little pinch.

“That’s it,” he said. “Not so bad, right?”

“Wait,” he added. “Didn’t you just say you’re a kickboxer? And you’re scared of a little needle?” He started laughing.

I did feel pretty stupid, considering the shot didn’t hurt at all. But I feel better knowing that nobody likes shots, not even people who make their living sticking needles into people.

Well, that is, except for the people who like getting things stuck through their bodies: piercing enthusiasts, masochists, those people who get suspended by ropes through their muscles as a hobby. I assume they like having their bodies cut into for the same reason that most people don’t like it, for the same reason people want to go spelunking or climb up the sides of cliffs or fly in airplanes: because you’re really not supposed to.

Bachelors

When I showed up at my friend Nelson’s house, his sofa was gone.

“It was really torn up,” he said. “I’m going to get a new one.”

He paused for a moment, hesitating to explain further.

“I’m thinking of getting a leather couch,” he said, a wary tone in his voice, as though he was testing my reaction.

Our other friend, Prospero, looked at me expectantly.

“I have a leather couch,” I said. “I like it.”

“What color is it?” Prospero quizzed me, his voice conveying that my answer would carry some significance.

“Black,” I said.

Prospero furrowed his brow. It seemed that I had given the wrong answer. “Hmm,” said Prospero.

“Why?” I asked.

“Prospero thinks that getting a leather couch means you’re a confirmed bachelor,” said Nelson. “Especially if it’s black.” His tone seemed to indicate that I had invalidated this theory.

Nelson and Prospero are both single, childless men in their forties. I’ve been noticing that virtually all of my older male role models seem to be destined for permanent bachelorhood. They travel a lot by themselves, for work and fun. They have set routines that would make it difficult for them to share their lives with someone else. I gather from comments they make that they sometimes date, but they don’t ever talk about who they are dating or bring the people they are dating around to any social events that I am at.

This is the key element defining bachelorhood: the lack of interest in finding a partner who will be integrated into one’s life in a meaningful way. Wikipedia says that one usage of the term refers to “men who do not have and are not actively seeking a spouse or other personal partner” (my emphasis). In other words, the term suggests not only unmarried status, but a commitment to an ongoing life of singlehood.

Many of my older female role models are single as well. But their attitudes about relationships seem to be different than those of my male friends. So far, my female role models all express the goal of finding someone to be in love with, to spend the rest of their lives with, even when this goal is contradicted by their tendency to date men who do not share it. My friend Loretta is very similar to Nelson and Propero: she is in her forties, independent, owns a house, has an active social life, and is usually dating somebody whom most of her friends don’t know very well or at all. She doesn’t get to be a bachelor, though her gender is one of the only things keeping her from being one. The only other difference is that, unlike my male bachelor friends, she claims to be looking for a permanent partner, though I don’t believe it’s a priority for her.

The distinction between bachelors and unmarried women is that the men are seen as mysterious and independent, while the women are a confusing aberration. Men are given permission for their relationships to not invade the core of their identities. People assume that a bachelor is dating somebody, and that it doesn’t really matter who that person is. But a woman who does not integrate her lover into her social life is seen as sexless (she must not have a lover) or as predatory and masculine (think of Samantha on Sex and the City), a loose woman who, as she enters middle age, will have her own gender-specific term applied to her: cougar, a word that gets applied to women who date younger men, even when the age difference is as small as five years, a gap that is not considered noteworthy if the genders are reversed. As a society, we don’t have a ready-made concept for a mature woman who is single, independent, and sexual.

Women don’t get to be bachelors. We have words like “spinster,” “old maid,” “maiden aunt.” Our decision to remain perpetually single is not glamorous but rather pathetic, a sign of our lack of desirability or sexuality. When entertainment magazines call an older male celebrity like George Clooney a “bachelor,” it adds to his mystique, precisely because of the sense of individualism and even selfishness that it suggests. When they refer to an unmarried woman, like Cheryl Crow, she has simply failed in her attempts to stay with the men who she has been publically connected with.

Why did Prospero associate leather couches with bachelors? Presumably because they have many of the qualities favored by bachelors: they are durable, practical, easy to clean, not fussy, not warm or excessively comfortable. Those are, incidentally, all of the reasons that I enjoy my leather couch.

“I guess I am sort of a bachelor,” I said to Prospero.

Or at least I hope to be one. I’m still at an age—my mid-thirties—where unmarried people are still considered to be not yet married, where we have not entered into the post-childbearing era of confirmed bachelorhood yet. I figure I have until forty or so before I am officially an unmarried lady. I’m hoping by then that the meanings of words will have shifted, and I will get to be a bachelor instead of a spinster.