When we last left our Abecedarium (well, after a brief detour to praise Lisa Scottoline), I was reflecting on Reflection—which is big for me this time of year.  As we wound that essay down, I teased that I would write this time on Surrender as I work to learn how to let go and accept what I cannot control.  That is a profound topic during these Days of Awe (the 10 days on the Jewish calendar that begin with Rosh Hashanah and end with Yom Kippur).  It is a time of deep reflection, evaluation, and commitment to personal growth and Gd’s commandments.  As I noodled on surrender these past couple of weeks, the universe has brought me several examples to share and learn from.

I began my thinking with observing when I find it easy to surrender.  There are not many examples; however, one my regular readers are already aware of is spin class.  I have been a lifelong exerciser (at varying levels of intensity and commitment) in good part because of my ability to surrender during a workout.  I will admit that approximately 10 out of 10 times, I don’t want to go to the Y.  Even if I’m looking forward to a workout, when I am in my jammies sipping a cup of coffee and reading my daily comics, the thought of working up the energy to sweat (or even just to stretch) is a monstrous barrier.  But I go through the process of brushing my teeth, putting on workout clothes and driving to the Y knowing that I can just surrender to the instructor.

I learned several years ago that I need an instructor or trainer to get my best workouts.  It is amazing what I will do in the gym when someone else tells me to do it (versus what I can motivate myself to do).  I think it’s because it feels good to just surrender the responsibility to someone else.  I can shut down my frontal lobe and go.  Nowhere is that more evident than in spin class, as I detailed in my essay on Flow.  At the end of those classes, I am physically drained yet mentally energized.  In that instance, surrender is easy because I have trust in the instructor, and I do know that if I really, really need to pull back that I can.  That trust and knowledge of an “out” allows me to relax and give my all.  If only surrendering in other parts of my life was as easy.

Last time, I introduced surrender in the context of learning to not force control in every aspect of my life.  Much of that need to control, I know, comes from fear of being blindsided by an action of another or confronted with something I didn’t know I didn’t know.  I feel compelled to make sure those situations never happen or, if they do, work to right that wrong.  But no matter how much I want to control those situations, sometimes I just can’t and I have to surrender to it.  I have to let it go.  Lordy, that’s hard!  And one of those situations popped up this past week.

I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a Friend Recommendation for someone that I had already been Facebook friends with for years.  This is not a close friend, but someone I worked with at Air Products for years and years and someone I considered more than just a colleague.  She is someone I admire and whose respect I was eager to earn and retain.  I checked my friend list and, sure enough, she wasn’t on it.  Then I noticed I lost a subscriber to the blog.  Were the two related?  When did she unfriend me?  Why?  Was it something I wrote in a blog post or posted on Facebook?  I try not to be controversial, but I am pretty honest and know that people won’t agree with everything I write.  But her?  I thought we were of like minds.  (I don’t know if she is the subscriber I lost because they’ve “updated” the website managing tools in such a way that I can’t figure out how to see my complete subscriber list.)  I stewed over this for days.  OK, I’m still stewing over this.  “What did I do?!” I keep asking myself.  I have toyed with sending her a message, asking if I wrote something to offend her.  I mean, maybe it was a mistake!  Maybe she accidentally unfriended me and the subscriber loss was a coincidence in timing.  Maybe I accidentally unfriended her?  that is when I took a long, slow, deep breath and said, “Let it go, Sherri.”  This is not someone I am close enough with that further steps to find resolution are critical in the grand scheme of things.  I must surrender to the situation.  I can’t control it.  I have to let it go.  But, dammit, it’s hard.

Finally, one more “surrender” challenge popped up yesterday and this is a hard one.  It is also not resolved yet.  We came back from the shore yesterday to take our Maine Coon mix, Beau, to his annual vet appointment.  We’d been concerned about some labored breathing and his attempts at what seemed like trying to get a hairball up to no avail.  The vet took an Xray to find his lungs and chest cavity filled with fluid.  He’s not even six years old!  Is he in heart failure this young?!  They tried to remove some of the fluid but he was too distressed so we took him to an emergency vet.  We knew he’d need to stay at least overnight, so we left him there and came home.  I don’t know how parents of sick children are able to put one foot in front of another, much less breathe.  Kissing him goodbye last night, knowing there was a chance he wouldn’t even make it through the aspiration, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  I’m crying as I type these words, even.  I keep thinking that Gd takes the holiest and best of us during the Hebrew months of Elul and Tishrei, which we are in now.  Beau is the sweetest cat I’ve ever had.  I can’t lose him this soon!  But I must surrender.  Surrender to the skill of the vets.  And surrender to Gd’s will.  He made it through the aspiration.  They removed 200 ml of fluid—almost a cup.  He’ll see the cardiologist today.  We can only take it one step at a time.  We don’t even know how he’s doing this morning, yet, since we can’t call until 9:00 and I’m writing early. 

I know I can’t control this.  In some ways, it’s easier to surrender when it is so clear things are out of your control.  I write to distract myself.  I take deep breaths.  I remind myself that these techniques are important for all of those little things, too.  Slow, deep breaths.  Focus on controlling yourself and your own reactions.  Take action when you can.  In the meantime, surrender.

(Postscript:  As I make my final edits before posting this essay, Beau is back home with us.  We don’t have the answers yet as to why he built up so much fluid.  The cardiologist doesn’t believe his heart disease is advanced enough to have caused it.  He clearly is more comfortable, acting very normal, very snuggly, and Bridget has finally stopped hissing at him.  We go back to talk with a surgeon and get him a CT scan on Wednesday.  We are trying hard to not option sort until we know more.  Meanwhile, I don’t miss a chance to love on him every time I can.)

Back in the early days of the pandemic, I wrote an essay on Balance.  In it, I used the visual of a pendulum instead of a two-pan scale.  Balance, I encouraged you to think, is a dynamic process (like the swinging of a pendulum) and not a static process (like perfectly balancing the weights on a two-pan scale).  The goal, I wrote, is not to achieve some nirvanic state of perfect balance, but to keep the amplitude of the swings to a minimum.

I’ve been noodling a lot on balance, again.  In that earlier essay, I was writing in the context of balancing precautions around exposure to the COVID virus with the need to keep our economy moving a bit and not isolate people too much.  This time, I’ve been thinking more about pendulum swinging.  Why do people seem to drive to extremes so easily?  And how can we dampen that swing to keep the pendulum oscillating more gently around the middle?

I think back to my time living in Mexico.  Since I lived about two hours from the Mexico City airport, guys from the plant where I worked were kind enough to drive me there when I needed to travel.  I lived in Central Mexico, which is clearly the most perfect place on earth.  High enough in elevation to never get too hot; southern enough to never get too cold.  Home were neither heated nor air conditioned.  But what that meant is that drives to the airport on cool winter mornings were an exercise in temperature extremes.  We’d be driving for a bit, freezing, when I’d ask the driver to turn on the heat.  He would turn it on full blast at the highest temperature setting.  After sweating for a while, I’d ask him to turn it down.  But he would turn it off.  There seemed to be nothing in between.  We’d alternatively freeze and sweat for the two-hour drive.  I’m sure, on average, the temperature in the car was comfortable.  But the swings of temperature were not.  The pendulum swung way too wildly when a nudge here and there would have worked much better.

I am a fan of the Art of the Nudge.  Maybe it’s my background as a synthetic organometallic chemist.  When you are trying to measure out exact milligrams of something, you learn to nudge.  Maybe it’s my evolving skills as a cook (not unrelated to my background as a chemist).  When you are cooking, it’s better to nudge the temperature, not cycle between full-on heat and off.  Nudging—small adjustments—work better when you are trying to approach an optimum.  These types of small adjustments also tend to work better to create lasting change.

There is a Japanese concept called “kaizen” that we would all do well to embrace.  This is the practice of making small changes.  Once a small change becomes engrained, you make another small change.  Little by little, you end up with a big change.  There are two advantages to approaching transformation with this method.  The first is that by absorbing small changes, you have a better chance of making them stick.  The second, of course, is that you avoid swinging the pendulum too far and too fast.  Dieting and exercise are two areas where we tend to be pendulum swingers.  When you approach a change in your diet (with the goal of losing weight) by eating restrictive fare, it is not uncommon to lose a bunch of weight and be miserable in the process.  Once the weight is off, too many of us swing the pendulum back to all the foods we love which packed on weight in the first place—and guess what happens?  Making small but permanent changes to how you eat is an example of kaizen.  A two-week juice cleanse is not.  Similarly, I’ve certainly experienced epiphanies around exercise.  I will place a significant expectation/burden on myself around how much I work out and how many days a week such that I either burn out or hurt myself.  Then I end up back on the couch again.  Small changes have a better chance at sticking.  And once you’ve engrained one small change, then you can decide if you want to take on another.

Managing those pendulum swings is easier when you are managing a change within yourself.  Sure, we all get impatient, or greedy, and push that pendulum too far.  We, alone, must deal with the backlash of the swinging pendulum which hopefully encourages moderation.  And many people go through their entire lives swinging from one extreme to another, so “easier” does not mean “easy”.  The real difficulty, though, comes when a change you might be pushing for—a movement of the pendulum to a different balance point—affects others.

Those who push for big changes usually come from one of two camps:  those highly unhappy with the status quo and those who just like to create chaos.  I have some compassion for the former.  I get highly irritated with the latter, so we’re just going to ignore them for the purposes of this essay.  Humans, generally, don’t like change.  We like life to be predictable, within boundaries, because it feels safer.  We like where the pendulum sits and we tolerate only minor swings around that balance point. If you are reasonably comfortable with the status quo, you will generally resist change.  If you are unhappy with the status quo, you will generally push for change and the amplitude of your push is proportional to your unhappiness.  If you are unhappy, you don’t see the current status of the pendulum as swinging gently through a balance point.  You see it as way off balance and want to give it a big push in the other direction.  (“Perspective” is another good “P” word.)  Living in a pluralistic society means that there will always be people who agitate for change and people who are happy with things just as they are.  I would argue that the benefits of living in a pluralistic society are worth it, but that’s a discussion for another time.  (Or maybe never, since my instinct is not to touch that one with a 10 foot pole!)

We have, however, absorbed a stunning amount of change if you view life over a longer time line.  As one example, I am stunned at the advances in LGBTQ+ rights and recognitions in my lifetime.  In fact, just look at how the term itself has evolved!  First, it was about “gay rights”; then “gay and lesbian rights”; then “LGBT”; now “LGBTQ+”—and in many instances even MORE letters that strive to include other marginalized elements of the community.  That does not mean there has not been regression or backlash (two steps forward, one step back).  Each time the term was expanded, each time the pendulum was nudged, there was pushback and it certainly continues today.  But the overall trend has been bravely forward and society is absorbing that change.  In fact, everything that agitates us today has probably been much worse at earlier times in human history.  As a big fan of the Outlander series of books, I have started watching the series on Starzz.  I can only watch it during the day, though, because the degree of violence that was typical of the 1700’s keeps me up at night.  Does that mean that we are done evolving?  No.  Does that mean that all these societal changes have been happily accepted by all?  Clearly not.  If you are the person agitating for change and pushing on that pendulum, remember that small changes are still good and you need to play the long game.  And if you are the person resisting change, try to understand why the status quo doesn’t work for the person pushing the pendulum.  It’s ok to push back a little to moderate the swing but not, generally, to stop it all together.  We all want balance, but it’s a dynamic process.  Just small swings, ok?

I must admit that coming up with words (or phrases) to match the “letter of the day” in our year-long Abecedarium has become a bit of a struggle. I knew it would. Heck, I even used Artificial Intelligence in the form of ChatGPT to help me write my “K” essay.  I’ve kicked around a number of “O” words this week. Obsession. Opportunity. Options. Ownership. Obstacles. Even Onomatopoeia. I was chatting with Trish this afternoon and she uttered a phrase that pulled together my disparate thoughts: “Sometimes,” she said, “you can be your own worst enemy.”  “Yes,” I responded, “but I own it.” That’s it! That what all my thoughts this week have been swirling around. The theme I have been noodling on is how every day, life presents us with opportunities; with options and their attendant consequences. We make choices, good and bad. But we must own those consequences.  It’s what I mean when I say I’m a “no regrets” person: it doesn’t mean I don’t wish things could be different; it means that I accept the consequences of my choices and work to make the best possible outcome out of the situation.

Longtime readers know that a recurring theme in my writing is Personal Accountability. I talk about this not to lecture YOU but to continually remind MYSELF.  I need to remember that life does not happen TO me, that I always have options to sort and choices to make and that, in the end, I have to own those outcomes. (“O” is for Own Your S**t, was the alternate title for this essay.) Case in point: my trip to Atlanta to see family where I am as I draft this essay.

I grew up in Atlanta and most of my immediate family is still there. I venture south every couple of months to visit my sister and my mom. It is no secret to anyone that I don’t like these trips.  That does NOT mean that I don’t want to see my family! I very much love spending time with my sister and mom; I just do not enjoy the process of getting there and then getting home.  I do have options, though.  I could choose not to go, but the consequence would be not seeing Mom and Wendy.  That is not acceptable to me.  I could choose to go less frequently than the approximately every two months I travel there, but the consequence of not seeing them that regularly is also not acceptable to me.  What I do choose is to spend a little more money on plane tickets that 1) allow me to reasonably avoid rush hours in both cities and 2) give me a bit more comfort in flight.  I used to buy the cheapest ticket I could find that got me there and back at reasonable times but found myself mightily agitated at the fight for what little overhead space was available and sitting in seats so close to the row in front of me that my knees touch the seatback even without slouching.  The cost of the upgrade is a consequence that I choose to accept.  Another choice I make, that Wendy never can wrap her head around, is taking a 7:00 am flight back.  I do this for a range of reasons.  First, those first-of-the-morning flights are your best bet for being on time.  Second, getting across town to the airport is easiest before dawn.  Third, the Uber drivers at that time of day are serious about their job and get me there efficiently and usually quietly.  And, finally, when it’s time to go home, I just want to get there.  The consequence of getting up at 3:30 (and not sleeping well BECAUSE I have to get up at 3:30) is acceptable to me.  For my night owl sister, it would be a fate worse than death.  Options and consequences.  Doesn’t mean I always like my choices, but I own them.

We have to sort options and make choices all day every day.  Sometimes the consequences are small:  Do I go to the Good Giant and know I’ll be able to get all I need, or go to the Bad Giant (which is closer) and risk them not having something critical?  Do I have oatmeal for breakfast which I know is healthy, or a breakfast burrito which I know will taste yummy but sit in my stomach like a rock?  Do I get up and feed Bridget now, or tolerate her chewing on my elbow, walking on my head, and generally being a nudge? (Actually, I usually give in on that last one.)  Sometimes the consequences can be significant:  Do I stay in this job or make a change?  Do I marry this person?  Do I run this red light?  I know I can’t eliminate risk from my life.  I have to know the potential consequences of my choices and then own the outcome.

There seems to be something of an epidemic these days of people wanting lots of options but not being willing to accept the consequences of whichever choice they make.  That, as we’ve well established, drives me bonkers.  It can also be dangerous.  Young people make risky choices all the time, mostly because they are not aware of, or have not yet learned to think through, the consequences of their actions.  They get a little bit of a bye from me on the “ownership” piece as they rack up experience (but I expect them to learn from it).  I give no such grace to adults who should know better.  When you have experienced enough to know the potential consequences of your choice, and you make that choice yet complain about the outcome, I have no patience for you.  Own it and deal with it.  Many times when someone says, “I had no choice,” what they are really saying is “I had no other option which involved consequences that I am willing to accept.”  You always have choices, even if your only choice is to accept an outcome and deal with it.  Even not making a decision is making a choice.  Beware of people who always play the victim.  These are usually people who just want to dodge accountability.  (I certainly want to differentiate here when people are truly victimized, which unfortunately does happen.) 

While I huff and puff about the behaviors of others, however, I reserve most of my irritation for myself.  This is another of those life skills that I will never perfect and will always be trying to get better at doing.  When I am in the shower at 4:00 am getting ready for my 5:00 am Uber, I remind myself:  You chose that 7:00 am flight.  When I choose to take back roads instead of the highway (or vice-versa) and end up stuck in traffic, I remind myself:  you chose that route.  When I was miserable in my last role at work, I kept reminding myself: you chose that job; now make the best of it.  In almost every instance of something irritating or trying, once I take ownership of the choice I made that got me into that situation, I find that the emotion lifts a little bit.  At first blush it may seem easier to play the victim.  It may seem like it will make you feel better and take less energy, but it doesn’t.  Accepting the consequences of your decisions and then asking, “What can I do about this?” gives you power.

“Options and ownership” has gotten me to the happiest stage of my life.  It’s how I’ve gotten out of unhealthy situations and into healthier ones.  It has given me peace of mind.  And it ensures that I see my Mom and sister regularly.

Retirement has been a really interesting time for me.  Throughout my schooling, my mind was absorbed with academics, learning how to be a human being/quasi-adult, trying to figure myself out, and trying to fit in.  For about the next 35 years (I count grad school more as “work” than “school”), my mind was absorbed with producing and advancing.  It was a soul-crushing mixture of “now-now-now” competing with “next-next-next”.  There were lots of interesting subjects that would flit across my brain, but I really had limited time to think Deep Thoughts.  I rarely allowed myself the luxury of that time, plus if I DID have time to think slowly and deeply about something other than a work challenge, I was usually too tired to put much into it.  I promised myself that when I retired, I would use at least a part of that time to allow myself to ponder random things.  This blog is partly a result of that.  In between reading too many e-newsletters, getting my Daily Challenges on too many games on my iPad, and the occasional Facebook doom scroll session, I noodle on things.  Today, you are going to be subjected to one of those things: my increasing agitation with the word Normal.

The word “normal” can have different meanings.  One is mathematical.  A mathematical normal is a line intersecting another line at a 90-degree angle.  I don’t have an issue with that.  (“Yay!” says Trish.  “Something she doesn’t have an issue with!”)  Where I get all twisted in knots is when “normal” is used as “conforming to a standard”.  And this is where the rabbit hole of my noodling comes into play.

Most of my life I have never, in many ways, felt “normal”—as in “conforming to a standard”.  I am left-handed in a right-handed world.  I am Jewish in a predominantly Christian country.  I am a woman who worked in a male-dominated field (especially during the early years of my career).  I am a chemist who worked for an engineering firm.  I am gay in a straight world.  I am a Southerner living in the Northeast (although that one really isn’t valid anymore!).  While we all SAY that there is nothing wrong with being different, there is clearly a judgment that comes with the word “normal”.  Unstated is that not conforming to the standard is a bad thing.  And many of us non-conformists take that a step further, deciding that we, ourselves, are bad.  Unfortunately, there has been a lot of discussion around what is “normal” and what is not “normal” in our world today.  It’s used in politics; it’s used in discussing so many of the “culture war” issues; it’s used to judge almost every aspect of people around us.  It’s not healthy. 

My thesis today is that the word “normal” should not be used as “conforming to a standard” because who gets to decide what the standard is? Plus, one standard cannot apply across a diverse population in most cases.  What most of us really mean when we say “normal”, however, is “typical.”  And this is where the Theory of Relativity comes in.  (I promised you rabbit holes!)

I am a big fan of Relativity.  Special Theory, General Theory, I don’t care.  Bring it on!  While I cannot even begin to understand the math, I really like the basic tenet that everything we observe is dependent upon the observer.  A good example is the Doppler effect.  We all know what that is, even if we don’t know what it’s called.  If you are standing near train tracks and a train is approaching blowing its whistle (probably to tell you to get further away from the tracks), you will first hear the whistle at a higher pitch.  As the train approaches, the pitch gets a bit lower and as the train passes you and rides off into the distance, the pitch gets lower and lower as it fades away.  However, if you happen to be riding on the train itself and hear the whistle blow, the pitch stays the same.  The whistle is the same for both observers.  The difference is the position of the observer.  (It has to do with compression of sound waves, but that’s not important here.)  What is “normal” or “typical”, then, really depends on the individual and their perspective.  There is no absolute “normal”.

Besides being a science geek with clearly way too much time on my hands, I have learned to become comfortable with what is normal or typical for me.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things I’m trying to improve upon (*cough* control issues *cough*).  It just means that I no longer feel the need to conform to a majority (or apparent majority) to which media and society encourage me to aspire.  That has been amazingly freeing!  Many times, particularly early in our relationship, Trish would look at me sideways and say, “You’re just not normal.”  I would get this in response to things like rearranging the dishwasher after she loaded it or singing along to TV commercials, or when she’d read one of these essays.  Now she pretty much keeps that comment to herself because 1) she has gotten used to my idiosyncrasies and sees these behaviors as “normal” and 2) she put a ring on it so she has no basis upon which to complain.

What has been more difficult (see: essay on Judgment) has been allowing other people to be their own typical selves.  As long as someone isn’t hurting themselves or others, they shouldn’t have to think or act like me, no matter how much I like how I think and act.  Just because it’s normal for me doesn’t mean it’s normal for someone else.  And I can have a REALLY hard time with that!

So, yes, my agitation with the word “normal” is directed outward towards our increasingly uncivil society, but it starts with being directed inward toward myself.  Dang it!  That always happens!  I always end up just looking in the mirror and needing to start there!  Darn these essays.  Feel free to do the same.  Try to redefine “normal” away from “conforming to a standard” and toward “typical”.  You do you.  I’ll do me.  And if we’re really lucky, we’ll all learn something from each other.

I considered many options for the “M” essay in our Abecedarium.  I thought about Meditation, since I’ve recently gotten back into regular practice and could talk about how useful it is.  Or I could have used Mindfulness as my “M” word, since that’s really what meditation is all about—learning to be present.  But I don’t want to talk about those things.  They are boring.  I want to talk about baseball.  “But, Sherri,” you say, “baseball is boring!”  And I would answer, “You are right.  But baseball is boring in a good way.”

When I was a little tomboy, I played softball for several summers.  My Dad taught me how to play, just as he taught me how to play basketball and swing a golf club (although he taught his lefty daughter how to golf right-handed which is why I don’t play golf).  Nothing could beat those spring and summer evenings in 90 degree Atlanta heat with 90% humidity, watching 8 year olds dink a softball and miss three different throws to ensure an infield home run!  Good memories!  Actually, they ARE good memories.  And that’s the point today.  I have very fond memories of watching Atlanta Braves games on TV with my Dad.  I would usually score the games because it made the time more interesting.  I even have a memory of going to a game live, sitting there with my glove in my lap, both hoping and fearing that a foul ball would come our way.

Something happened over the intervening years, though.  I strayed from baseball.  It became….boring.  The game moved too slowly.  I wasn’t passionate about any team.  It couldn’t hold my attention.  Then Trish and John Kruk brought baseball back into my life.  Philadelphia is a sports town and we Philadelphians are famously Phanatical about our teams.  Trish and I watch the Eagles play football in the fall and winter and baseball in the spring and summer.  (We cry a lot between the Super Bowl and the start of Spring Training baseball.)  We often watch football with our neighbors, always decked out in Eagles green, and usually with lots of alcohol.  Football games are an EVENT because there are only 17 games in the regular season and they all mean something.  There is lots of action and brutality and yelling at the TV—all things that make for good wholesome fun.

Baseball is different.  There are 162 games in the regular season so any given game has little meaning.  That doesn’t mean we don’t get disgusted and throw things at the TV but we do get over it more quickly.  Plus, the pace of the game is just slower.  And that’s where John Kruk comes in.  Kruker is an all star first baseman who played for the Phillies from 1989 until 1994.  He’s also a very down-to-earth guy who is just a joy to listen to when he comments on baseball.  Kruker and Tom McCarthy, the Phillies play-by-play announcer, have a comfortable on-air banter that sometimes includes talking baseball and often involves stories from John’s playing days, life growing up in West Virginia, and whatever food he can coerce the vendors from Citizens Bank Park to bring up to him.  I’d say he’s the perfect mix of John Madden, Tony Romo, and Yogi Berra.  He brought back my love of the game.  You can find us most summer nights watching the Phils, playing on our iPads, and laughing with John and Tom.  It’s a good life.

Every now and then, we wander to the park to watch a game live.  This week, we were lucky enough to catch two games in person.  Last Sunday, we went down to Citizens Bank Park to watch the Phillies take on the Mets.  My best friend and her husband met us there and he was even brave enough to wear his Mets T-shirt (although he softened the pushback from Phillies fans by wearing an Eagles cap).  You never know what the weather will be like when you buy tickets but that’s part of the fun.  CB Park is an outdoor stadium—none of this wimpy dome stuff for us stout Philly fans!  We melt in the summer and freeze in the winter like the good Lord intended!  Sunday happened to be a “melt” day.  And we were in full sun.  Thankfully, we were on the Hall of Fame level, which meant we could go into air conditioning if needed.  It was needed.  We ate.  We drank.  We laughed.  We sweated.  And we watched a little baseball.  That’s the good thing about the game.  Even with the new rules to speed things up, you just don’t miss much if you go to the bathroom.  Or go get ice cream.  Or sit and chat for a while, eating the ice cream.

Unfortunately, the Phillies were as listless as we were that day and by the bottom of the 7^th inning we’d had enough. Plus, Trish was getting dehydrated since I just can’t get the woman to drink enough water.  Afternoon thunderstorms were rolling in, the Phils were down 6-3, and it looked like it was just going to get worse.  Of course, baseball being baseball, as we were driving home Lorraine checked her phone and exclaimed, “What the?!  The Phillies are ahead 7-6!”  We turned on the radio to learn that the Phils came up to bat in the 8^th inning and pulled ahead in true Phillies style.  Not by actually “batting” of course.  There was one actual hit, two walks, and two batters who got hit by pitches, resulting in four runs.  The Phillies won (well, the Mets lost) and we missed the rain.  All in all, a good day.

Wednesday, we drove up to the Lehigh Valley to watch the Phillies AAA farm team, the Iron Pigs, play.  We REALLY went up to meet Charlie Manuel, the legendary Phillies manager who led the team to a World Series victory in 2008.  Such a nice man!  He shook our hands, signed our baseballs in script that is actually legible, and posed for a picture.  We took our seats behind home plate and settled in for a beautiful (and comfortable) night of baseball.  In spite of the fact that the bratwurst vendor hadn’t bothered to cook any bratwurst (what?) and the gluten free stand had no buns for their sandwiches (what?), it was a great night.  The guy sitting next to me broke the ice when he leaned over to his adult son and said loudly, “If a foul ball comes this way, I think I can take this lady sitting next to me.”  I, of course, gave it right back to him and a friendship with Chuck was born.  We yelled at the batters together.  We discussed our mutual love of John Kruk.  We hoped for a foul ball which never came.  And we cheered on Hambone in the Running of the Meat Products.  (Poor Hambone never wins.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I made some really great memories this week.  I look over at that signed baseball and think about complaining that we signed Trea Turner for way too much money (and then he hits a home run), cheering for Bryce Harper, booing the Mets pitcher when he checked the runner at first base, arguing over how short the Iron Pigs third baseman is, and sparring with Chuck about foul balls.  I think about comfortable summer evenings watching the Boys of Summer do their thing and sweltering summer afternoons with some of the most important people in my life, wondering how long the Philly Phanatic can stay in that hot costume.  And that’s what it’s all about.  Life is short.  Go make some memories.

Last weekend, Trish and I drove to the Jersey shore to help her brother put together furnishings for his new shore property.  It was going to be a “work” visit—we weren’t heading out on vacation.  However, the two hour drive there was a lot of fun because we laughed the whole way.  I think what I love more than anything else about Trish is that she always makes me laugh.  In fact, she put it in her wedding vows.  She committed to giving me a good belly laugh every day.  Five years in, so far so good.

We talked during that drive about using “laughter” as my “L” word because it is so important in our lives.  As I’ve thought about it more, I realize how important laughter is in ALL of our lives and within almost all of our relationships—certainly within any close relationship.  Trish and I have a very similar sense of humor, meaning that we find the same subjects and word plays funny.  We build off each other’s comments and the more we build, the more we laugh since that back-and-forth is funny in and of itself.  That’s why the famous Abbott and Costello skit “Who’s on First” is so funny (at least to me).  The individual jokes are good, but when you put them in a rapid fire back-and-forth it’s irresistible.  To this day, if someone says “I don’t know” I can’t resist saying “third base.”  (I just invested the 8 minutes watching the full clip that I linked to above.  Treat yourself and do the same.)

It’s not just Trish that cracks me up.  Her whole family does.  They are all born story tellers.  I learned early on to restrict fluids before family gatherings. I spend so much of the time together doubled over in laughter I risk peeing my pants!  What a gift!  And it’s not just story telling.  Even every day exchanges become comedy routines.  Here is an actual text exchange from Saturday.  We were invited over to her cousin’s house for a get-together Sunday:

Trish:  Hi Coll.  Are we lounging by the pool tomorrow—should we bring suits?  Just asking…

Coll: Yea you can bring your string bikinis!

Trish:  I only have tops…

Coll:  That’s fine—it’s just good clean fun!

Every family text exchange is like this one!  I can’t keep up!  I’m just not that quick.  But I laugh a good belly laugh every day.

People who have known me for a long time tell me I’ve never looked happier or more relaxed.  Yes, being in a healthy relationship is a big part of that but it’s the fact that so many of my relationships are filled with laughter.  We all know how important laughter is physiologically and mentally.  Laughing floods your system with endorphins, crowding out that stressed-produced cortisol and lowering your blood pressure.  It lightens you up.  In fact, just curling up the corners of your mouth into a smile and letting your eyes crinkle with them often has the same effect.  I find that if I just start a little smile, I begin to think of things that DO make me smile and then that artificial smile becomes real.  (You just tried it, didn’t you?  You’re welcome.)

A lot of people who know me think that I’m a very serious person.  In many ways, I guess I am.  I generally had to be very serious at work (if I wanted to be taken seriously) and I like to think Deep Thoughts.  And, yeah, I tend toward a bit of nerdy science humor.  I’ve always loved The Far Side scientist cartoons and Trish has promised to slap me the next time she asks “What’s new?” and I respond “E over h.”  (A little PChem humor.  Very little.)  Trish is often pushing me to be “funnier” in these essays.  Honestly, I do try!  But writing is a very serious thing for me.  Even when writing about laughter I have trouble lightening up!  But those who know me deeply know that I really like to laugh.

No one knows that better than my best friend.  Beth and I have been best friends since we met my second year of grad school (that would be almost 40 years ago now).  We have been through a lot of life together, good and bad.  One of the things that makes our friendship so lasting is that we are the queens of the inside joke.  We can just say one word or short phrase to each other and we dissolve in laughter.  (“Capodimonte!” “He had plans.” “Five minutes away!” “Pez dispenser.”  I could go on.)  What makes these lines funny are the memories they evoke.  We could even try to explain some of these jokes to you, but you’d probably just look at us blankly while we doubled over in laughter.  We are the epitome of “you just had to be there”.  Those memories, that laughter, bonds us even tighter than the tough times we’ve navigated together.  I never want to stop making memories with her and with a birthday trip to New Orleans coming up, I’m sure we won’t.  (Here’s a great SNL clip from just before Philly beat New England in the Super Bowl.  It’s for people who are from Philly and/or football fans.  Don’t watch this if you are neither.  It just won’t be funny.  Lots of inside jokes!)

There are a lot of complaints these days that people have lost their sense of humor and that everyone has gotten too sensitive.  To this I say, “Know your audience.”  When I am with my gay friends, we laugh constantly at jokes built around gay stereotypes.  We can do this because we know each other’s hearts and we’ve lived the reality.  There is some truth to the thought that you can only make certain jokes if you are part of the group.  I do not find the same jokes funny when they are told by someone who is not gay or whom I do not know well.  And it’s because I don’t really know their intent, which we touched on a bit recently.  Same thing with Jewish jokes or even female-centered jokes.  While people can certainly be over-sensitive, most of the time it’s because they don’t know the true intent of the jokester.  Yes, we need to give people a little grace and assume benign intent, but there are plenty of homophobes and anti-Semites out there who are not so benign.  And I’ve had to silently “take it” many, many times when people have told a joke in my presence and who don’t know (or forgot) that I am gay or Jewish.

Look, I can be as politically incorrect as the next person.  Mostly, I choose to express those jokes in restricted company.  I unfortunately have had to learn that “know your audience” lesson over and over again and try to remember that others are trying to do so as well.  We NEED to laugh!  We NEED to not take ourselves too seriously!  And we need to respect others and try our best to be kind in the process.  I’ve leave you with one more clip, as someone in her 60’s ready to start collecting Social Security and join Medicare.  Because we all need to learn to laugh at ourselves, too.

When we last left our Abecedarium, with the word Judgment for the letter J, I decided to switch gears a bit.  I hinted that I would find my “K” letter through the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.  You probably live under a rock if you have not heard about the emergence of these “large language model” AI (artificial intelligence) programs.  To explain, these LLM’s, as they are called, are programs that have read literally everything on the internet and can return “answers” to your “questions” in common prose.  Your “question” may be a prompt like “explain to me how a human eye works” or “plan a two day vacation in Seattle” or “why might I get a strange rash between my toes”.  The “answer” is developed by the LLM digging into all the text it has consumed and then building a response by predicting what the next word should be based on the previous one(s).  In other words, LLM’s interpolate.  They don’t exterpolate.  Nor do they understand the difference between reliable information and total bullshit (see: question about that rash). 

Right now, people seem most concerned about these LLM’s putting people out of work.  I have no doubt that might happen.  But tech advances have always obsoleted some jobs and yet created many, many more.  The trick, in my opinion, is to figure out how you can use something like an LLM as a tool—not how you can fight it (see:  current WGA strike).  Here’s an example my analytical science friends will understand.  Back in the prehistoric days of chromatography (a technique for separating compounds in a mixture), if you wanted to quantify the amounts of the compounds in a mixture you would do this:  take the spectrum which is drawn by the instrument on a strip chart and cut out the peaks (with scissors!) associated with the different compounds; literally weigh those cutouts; then perform mathematical calculations involving those weights and response factors previously determined.  Now (and by “now” I mean since the 1980’s), a computer program does all that for you, in addition to running the experiment.  Did that put a lot of scientists out of work?  That’s a LOT of labor that went away.  No.  It freed those scientists up to think about what the results meant in the context of why the experiment was run and to dream up more experiments.  Scientific progress sped up dramatically. 

I believe these LLM’s can be similar tools.  Since they currently can only interpolate, they can’t do the really creative stuff.  What they can do is help people like me that hyperventilate at the sight of a blank page.  So.  Let’s have ChatGPT help me write this essay.  There was no obvious “K” noun that occurred to me as I wrapped up last time, so I put in the prompt “Generate a list of five random nouns that begin with the letter K”. The program returned these nouns:  kite, key, kingdom, knife, kaleidoscope.  So far, so good.  Then I asked it to write a 300 word story using those nouns.

I quickly figured out the first new job role that will be created as a result of these LLM’s:  Prompt Writer.  Just as the people who performed, by hand, the laborious calculations to send the first astronauts into space later became the first programmers of computers that would do those calculations, I’m guessing writers will become the first professional Prompt Writers.  My initial observation of ChatGPT’s response to my prompt is that the story was 419 words long.  It’s not that ChatGPT is not that precise with math.  It was that I was not precise with my prompt.  The story did indeed include 300 words.  But I wanted a story NO MORE than 300 words.  Next, I noticed that by requesting a “story,” the tool returned what is likely the most common type of writing associated with that word:  a children’s story.  What followed was 419 awkward words about a faraway kingdom where a special little girl found a box that contained a kite, a key, and—wait for it—a magical knife that granted wishes.  Of all the common objects I could think of that I might expect to grant wishes, a knife would NOT be an intuitive choice—unless the magical wish is to maim someone.  Finally, I see this output as a children’s story that is not entirely different from many children’s stories that are out there—which is probably where it came from since the LLM “learned” from existing stories. 

I tried again: “Write a paragraph no more than 200 words in length that includes the nouns kite, key, knife, kingdom, and kaleidoscope.”  The response was another children’s fantasy story, this time a precise 185 words, but very similar to the previous attempt.  One more time:  “Write a non-fiction paragraph of no more than 200 words that includes the words kite, key, knife, kingdom, and kaleidoscope.”

The response:  “In the world of art and craftsmanship, the creative process often resembles a kaleidoscope, where unique elements come together to form a harmonious masterpiece. Just as a skilled artist wields a paintbrush, a chef wields a knife with precision and finesse. But beyond the realms of traditional arts, creativity also finds its expression in the intricate designs of a lock, waiting to be unlocked with a key. In the field of literature, storytelling is akin to building a kingdom of words, where characters and plotlines weave a rich tapestry of imagination. And just as a kite soars high in the sky, propelled by the wind, ideas take flight in the vast expanse of the writer’s mind, driven by inspiration and passion. Whether it’s painting a vivid picture with words, crafting a delicious culinary creation, unlocking the mysteries of a story, or creating a world with words, these diverse expressions of creativity remind us of the kaleidoscope of possibilities that exist within each of us, waiting to be explored and shared with the world.”

Better, I guess, but sort of a word salad.  A little freaky, though, that the topic it chose was “creativity” when I had just been saying that LLM’s aren’t really creative!  The tool is only as good as the prompt, though.  ChatGPT is trying to give me what I want.  I tried one more scary thing.  I asked it to write said non-fiction paragraph in the style of Sherri Bassner.  It should have sourced all my blog entries, articles for Lab Manager, and scientific articles, then pulled together a short paragraph in the style it assumes is mine. 

Here is the result:  ” In the realm of human experience, creativity flutters like a butterfly, drifting from the vibrant kaleidoscope of one’s mind. It takes a delicate touch, like the feathered stroke of a painter’s brush or the precise slice of a chef’s knife, to unlock the possibilities within. Just as a key fits perfectly into a lock, creativity unlocks the doors to new worlds and uncharted territories. It is in these unexplored realms that we build our own kingdoms, shaping stories that breathe life into our existence. Like a kite soaring through the limitless sky, imagination takes flight, capturing the whimsical essence of our dreams. And just as a kaleidoscope refracts light into a symphony of colors, so too does creativity refract our experiences, transforming them into something extraordinary. It is through the lens of creativity that we transcend the mundane and discover the magic that lies within ourselves and the world around us. With the intertwining threads of the kite, key, knife, kingdom, and kaleidoscope, we unlock the hidden depths of our imagination and create a tapestry that reflects the beauty of the human spirit.”

Ugh.  Please don’t tell me I write like that!  Sure, I like a good metaphor but, really!  Let’s just say I’m not particularly worried about ChatGPT obsoleting my blog.  I also don’t think the Writer’s Guild should be too concerned.  Sure, the LLM’s might take on a lot of the derivative writing.  But the writing that really matters, the writing that means something and will pay well, has to be original—and the LLM’s can’t do that.  Yet.