Happy Fun Cog

Recently, my girlfriend and I volunteered at a local farm for a sheep exhibition that opened the farm to the public for the annual rite of shearing. She'd volunteered numerous times before, though this was my first time. We worked a three-hour shift doing something called 'skirting,' in which the wool from a freshly-sheared sheep is picked free of any major debris that could "impact the integrity of the wool" (read: sheep poop).

Because this was an exhibition, we were doing our work on a table in front of the barn and were watched by any number of people (mostly parents with small children). People would often ask us questions about what we were doing and I would answer . My answers were based purely on information that I'd just gleaned that day from the 30-second tutorial given to us by the farm hands and by what I'd read on the poster-sized presentations on the shearing/milling process in the walls of the sheep barn.

My girlfriend teased me about how authoritative I sounded; my father teaches at a medical school, so in my adolescence I received plenty of lectures from someone well-versed in the art of lecturing. And from what I could tell, people took what I said to be the absolute truth.

The experience made me think about how easy and common it is to assume that someone knows what they're talking about based purely on the situation at hand. For example, if I were to see some guy with a hard hat and tool belt working on a phone line, I am going to think (not verbatim) "There's one of the phone company's experts doing his job," as opposed to "There's some guy with a tool belt working on the phones; I wonder if he knows what he's doing?"

Not everyone is so quick to assume expertise, of course. Many people are naturally skeptical, though within that population it's been my experience that most skepticism is in fact arrogance ("I'm an expert on anything that I set my mind to so I don't need to listen to anyone else ") as opposed to genuine intellectual rigor.

Still, it was a very vivid example of how many people, including myself, perceive and make snap judgments of authority based wholly on circumstantial evidence and has made me think about how often I do that in my own life.

Also, for the record, the smell of sheep poop lingers on your hands for days. Or maybe you shouldn't take me at my word. Find some sheep poop and dig in. It's the only way you'll know for sure.

I got flipped off while driving to work today. I haven't seen nearly as many middle fingers as you'd expect via the reputation of Boston drivers, though that coud due special circumstances like my avoidance of rush hour or the fact that I'm blind in both eyes.

I was making a right turn, trying to pull out of a parking lot and into a left turn lane, crossing a right turn lane in the process. A truck was coming from my left. The truck was not yet at the point where the road, previously a single lane in each direction, split into the aforementioned left and right turn lane. I judged the distance and decided to pull out. The truck was in front of me much more quickly than I anticipated, and I had to stop halfway through my turn, effectively blocking the right turn lane. The traffic light about 20 years down had turned red, freezing us in that position.

It wasn't clear to me exactly what had gone wrong until I looked in the driver's cab of the truck and saw the driver, an old black guy who had a flat face that reminded me of the black people that I saw while living in the South in that he looked like he'd come from a family of people who'd been in America for generations rather than a recent immigrant.

He was trying to make eye contact with me and when I finally looked at him he just stared at me. That in turn led me to believe that he was doing a stare-down, that he was making a point, that he had specifically blocked me from pulling out. Now this is something that I've seen a lot of in Boston. Many people here drive out of contempt for other people, changing speed or switching lanes just for the sake of blocking another driver.

When I realized that, I just rolled my eyes and looked away. I hate confrontation, especially in traffic. Either you're a psycho and you're going to get out of your car (which has also happened to me) or you're going to go on your way. Why dance around it? Go psycho or move on.

In any case, when my eyes drifted forward again, I saw the guy flipping me the bird; he was just putting down his hand as I looked back at him. When the light changed and traffic moved forward again, I saw that the truck was actually trying to turn right. This was the funniest/saddest/most infuriating part of the equation, which is that if the dummy had not tried to block me, he could've moved into the right turn lane and gotten to the traffic light in time to make the last few seconds of green.

I take Route 9, a major inter-city thoroughfare in the Boston area, to work every day. To get to the brick and glass office complex in which I spend too much of my life, I exit Route 9 via a concrete lane that arches over the opposite traffic flow and deposits my car and I at a traffic light. There are three lanes to choose from when one approaches the light from the above-described route: one lane turns left, to yet another complex of office buildings, and two go straight forward in a route that will take you to my office complex and eventually back over Route 9 and then to some other road; Route 30, I think.

This morning, I was in the middle lane while waiting at the light. There were two cars ahead of me. In the lane to my left, the left-turn lane, there were another three cars. The light turned green. As I pressed my car's accelerator, I saw that the last car in line on my left was still. The woman inside had not noticed that the light had changed and that traffic was moving forward. I honked at her as I drove past.

The above story is not true, but is also true.

As my lifestyle has become healthier, I've started to drink a lot of water. On some level, it's simply practical: I'm replacing the sweat I'm losing through exercise, I'm taking daily supplements (fish oil, vitamin C, etc.) that go down much smoother with large quantities of water, and I'm hydrating myself to counter the larger amounts of caffeine I've started ingesting now that it's the only recreational drug I allow myself.

In short, if my urine is anything other than clear, I consider myself poorly hydrated.

At the same time, I've also felt like I'm consistently chilly. I wear two pairs of socks at work, with one pair being thick hiking socks. When I'm at my desk, I wear the same knit cap that I wear when I go outside.

Up until the past few weeks, I always assumed that this was due purely to my loss of body fat. But it suddenly: all the water I've been drinking, at least 60 ounces a day at work alone, is cold. Refrigerated. At work, I get my water from the cold tap on the water cooler. At home, I keep my Brita filter in the fridge.

I never thought about the simple fact that drinking cold beverages makes you cold. On an instinctual level, of course, that knowledge was there. But I didn't apply that little piece of knowledge to my daily work. I've since started drinking room temperature water and feel noticeably warmer (though the two pairs of socks and knit cap remain part of my cubicle wardrobe).

As with many of my ruminations, I think that there is a lesson here that applies to other parts of my life. I rarely think about the impact of the things that I take into my body (caffeine, alcohol, food, etc.) and mind (heavy metal music, emotionally challenging movies, etc.). And because I don't think about that, I look at any adverse affect as being evidence of some flaw in me as opposed to being a result of rather superficial conditions that I've created. That's not to discount the power and importance of one's emotions and subconscious, of course, as I believe that the majority of one's conscious experience are based on or shaped by those two factors.

Consider an example: not too long ago, I would start off many days of the week by washing down 10 milligrams of Ritalin with a large, strong cup of coffee and listening to speed metal. Not coincidentally, I also started off those same days with a racing heart, angst, and anger. I assumed that my fast pulse and quick anger were a reflection of some deep, inner turmoil which I could not understand and therefore could not fix. So I thought less of myself and never considered the role of all the external things I was internalizing.