Freedom

Important dead people were buried in the floors of Enland's churches for centuries. It’s a terrifically smart idea to bury people inside a church because when you visit someone’s grave and it's rainy you don’t have to stand outside and feel even more depressed than you would normally when visiting a grave because also you’re wet.

I once stood on John Locke’s grave inside a church at Oxford. He was the philosopher who said that mankind possesses inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of property. Many people believe that these three items are the basis for modern freedom. I was deeply moved to stand on John Locke’s grave at Oxford, and since freedom is really important I would have bought a t-shirt, but none were for sale.

Once when we were teenagers, my friend Alan conducted a freedom experiment. He came up with this experiment one day after showering. It was his idea that freedom actually meant nothing touching you – no clothes, not even the ground. Purely on a whim, he jumped up in the in the bathroom after towelling off. Because of the exhilaration of the first jump he even took off the puka shell necklace that he never took off because he said girls liked it. With absolutely nothing touching him Alan jumped up again and again that morning and he called the feeling ‘real freedom.’

I thought that this was a cool idea when Alan told me about when we were teenagers. But he never told me why he quit with his freedom experiment. Recently we were having drinks and hot wings, and Alan said that he liked the feeling of real freedom so much that he began wondering how he could remain aloft naked longer.

One morning after showering he went into his room in a towel, climbed up on top of his dresser and planned to jump from his dresser to his bed. This was a pretty good jump and he would most certainly be in the air longer than simply jumping up in the bathroom. Just as he leapt, Alan said, his mother came into his room without knocking to make sure he was getting ready for school. Naked in midair he scrunched up into a ball to cover himself in front of his mother. When he landed on his bed, his “jewels” as Alan always calls them, were between his legs and the force of the landing on his side caused his legs to smack together. Alan said that his landing hurt him so much that he immediately barfed.

Alan went on to say that he felt weird around his mom for a long time, especially since she even helped him clean up the barf. She wasn’t mad or anything. But it was hard to explain to her what he doing, Alan said.

Luck

There's a sticky problem in the behavioral sciences that no behavioral scientist likes to admit. It's that most behavioral research is conducted by asking questions of its subjects. Chemists don't ask particles why they act as they do when heated. Not in public, anyway. But if they did, they would encounter the same knotty issue that plagues behavioral researchers; questions influence answers.

The reason questions influence answers is because we all want to appear virtuous and intelligent in front of others. My friend Alan once was selected at random to be a Nielsen television home for one week. He was asked to keep a diary of his viewing choices for the week and send them back into Nielsen for compilation into national ratings. We were watching “America’s Funniest Bloopers” and he wrote “Masterpiece Theater” into the diary. I asked Alan why he did this and he explained that he had planned to watch Masterpiece Theater, but as he switched channels an overweight woman falling off a horse into a mud puddle caught his eye, and he was hooked. It wasn’t as if Alan was lying; he meant to do the right thing.

So what if you were asked this question; "Would you rather be highly skilled at something or lucky?" How would you answer? Probably that you would want to be highly skilled. After all, that response indicates virtue, a willingness to work hard and a care for quality -- the things for which we humans are supposed to strive. But would you actually rather be lucky? Heck, there's millions of skillful people living difficult lives.

But then on the other hand, think of someone you know who is adept at some complex task. Have you ever noticed that knowing serenity in their eyes? That thoughtful calm? It can make you envious. Now think of the bozo down the street who hit the Lotto. Who would you rather be? Skill takes time, luck happens. Mastering a physical or mental task is sweaty work. Finding a Picasso at a yard sale isn't. If you ask me, I'd rather be skillful. That's if you ask me.

Life

Life was in the form of single-cell organisms when it first began on Earth. These organisms were microscopic and multiplied by dividing themselves. After consuming enough nutrients to reproduce, the cell would simply yank itself in half and the two parts would go their separate ways.

Not until millions of years later did an organism develop the knack of sexual reproduction. A fancy green algae named spirogyra was the one. How or why it occurred is a mystery to scientists, but the world was never the same after spirogyra appeared. Old-fashioned and frumpy cell dividers stood by and ceased all flagellation as they caught sight of sexy spirogyra doing it.

In high school I felt like a cell divider. I would go to dances and see the good-looking kids dancing on the gym floor and making out in dim corridors. I just couldn’t get the hang of it. My only solace was I hoped that some day - since I wasn’t a single-cell organism – I would not have to tear myself in two to reproduce.

My friend Alan wasn't so resigned. He was much more determined than I was to get satisfaction spirogyra-style. So all during high school dances Alan would ask girls to dance and he would try to make out with them. Eventually, he would be with me on the bleachers watching. It was difficult for Alan because he was more afraid of having sex alone than I was having sex with an actual other person. His father had told him that all sorts of horrible things happened to boys who did. I think that's why Alan spent so much time in detention during high school; he always discharged a school fire extinguisher just before leaving dances.

Gratitude

There are necessities in everyday life that did not always exist. Objects such as keys, paper clips, pop-tops cans and hair brushes had to be invented by someone. Engineers stewed for years coming up with the perfect design for paper clips. In fact, many heroic and frustrated lives were spent on conjuring and constructing paper clip designs that didn't measure up to the one familiar to us today. Yet we take these things utterly for granted. Is this wrong? Will this collective ungratefulness haunt us later? Probably not. It's human nature. Who has the time to ponder origins of the little things in every day life? Philosophers, maybe. But they spend their time on concepts more lofty than wondering how we should appreciate zippers and pencils.

That's why my friend Alan started a museum of ordinary things. His idea was that this museum would display lots of regular stuff and give explanations of how they came to be. An institution like this could make us a more appreciative society, Alan thought. I remember how optimistic he was as we moved a display case in the new museum before it opened. He thought that his museum could ignite a new pervasive feeling of gratitude among people and possibly lead to a more peaceful world. "Remember how nice people were to each other after September 11? People were nice to each other for once," he said. "They were polite to other drivers on the road – it was great. That’s what this museum can do."

At first, no one came. That was bad enough. But then it became funny to come. Kids would come in groups of friends and giggle all day long at the displays. Then it became cool among smug artist-types to go to Alan’s museum and they would take pictures of each other in front of various exhibits wearing their turtlenecks and high top sneakers and they would laugh. They bought museum t-shirts by the handful.

Alan was not happy. The response to his museum was the exact opposite of what he had hoped to accomplish. He would stand by clever ironic types and listen as they dramatically read aloud the history of the wooden clothespin and he would clench his fists in silent rage. For Alan, this was war.

What he did next was genius. He actually was making good money on the admission paid by all the ironic types. And since he didn’t have to worry about tight security for the displays, his overhead was low. So he put in a sound system and piped in country music – not the sad old kind of country music, but the new uplifting patriotic kind. And he hired a bunch of skinny models to walk around and serve cheese cubes with tooth picks in them. Alan's museum was a hit with tourists and the sniggering bohemians stopped coming.

I don't think I've ever seen Alan so happy. "Game, set and match," he said one night as he closed up the place on our way to get dinner. The best part was that he finally was selling all those extra large museum t-shirts that the artist-types didn't buy.

The Weight of the World

Has the world gotten heavier as it's aged? There are billions more people than ever before and that has to weigh a lot. But then again people eat lots of heavy food and turn it into energy that weighs nothing. So does it balance out? All the new plants in a garden weigh a lot. And there's millions of gardens all around the world. Have gardens made the earth heavier?

But then, there's the physical law of conservation -- that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It seems that this law necessarily mandates that the earth weighs the same amount as it did when it came into being. That means for every new baby born somewhere on the planet, something weighing the same amount has to be eliminated. Is this an automatic process? One would hope. If not there would have to be something like Celestial Bureau of Weights and Measures that enforces the law of conservation and it would have to be the largest bureaucracy in the universe. Imagine the paperwork needed just to track a moth burnt in a campfire, and the pursuant forms needed to trigger equal moth weight creation somewhare on the planet.

I suppose once in a while a clerk at this bureau gets lazy and decides to skip some paperwork by simply creating another identical moth. Or even just popping the vaporized moth right back into existence. It could happen since people don't pay moths much attention. Who would be the wiser? Giving cats nine lives was a cost saving measure by this bureau I'll bet.

If this omnipotent agency actually exists, my friend Alan probably has a friend there who could arrange one of those sweet deals where you come back as your favorite animal. Of course there would be the small detail of having to weigh the same amount as your favorite animal. A really fat person couldn't come back as a bird. Unless the bird had stayed aloft its entire life. Then I suppose you could get around the weight issue entirely.