In a recent survey where I asked one friend for a subject to blog about, he suggested “love” and what it means to different people.  Well, I’ll admit I don’t know what it means to different people (though I have a fair idea from reading I’ve done) so please feel free to share your thoughts on this subject.

So what is love?  Love is an emotion we can measure by putting people into a machine and taking a functional MRI of their brain.  We can watch the areas light up and we can try and determine if they’re speaking from the emotional part of their brans or the language part.  We can see what makes those areas “light up”.

So that’s love in its quantitative form.

But what is love in its fluffy, unadulterated form?  Pillow talk in bed amongst lovers?  The bond shared between family members?

First of all let me state that I don’t believe in soul-mates.  I don’t believe in love at first sight (it’s called physical attraction) and I don’t believe in unconditional love (except you, dad).

What I do believe about love is that it is mutual fulfillment; a fulfillment that originates from first understanding the other person.  Once you understand who a person is, what matters to them, then you can determine whether or not you will find fulfillment in sharing experiences with said person.

Here is an example that is quite revealing:  babies scare me.  Not little babies that are already born and cute but carrying babies.  Pregnancy.  Childbirth.  What happens when you’re pregnant and then have to deliver the little monkeys.  So, I’ve compromised with myself that I will have babies au naturel as long as I can deliver them by C-section.  (Now, the fine print:  yes of course at the end of the day I will do whatever is best for the monkeys, but if given a choice, I would schedule a C-section when the time was right).  To some people that I have said this to, it is an abomination.  I am not being a woman.  (Uh, note: this response mostly comes from men, but I digress.)  So what does this mean?  It means my future babymaker partner will have to live with the fact that he will never be part of the miracle that is childbirth except for the part where he’s handed the baby (OR’s are sterile, sorry future hubs).

So back to what love is — love is just the comprehensive, more succinct term for, “I think we could get along.  I don’t mind compromising things with you, like what color car to buy, but if anything that is part of my structural identity (see this post) conflicts with something that is part of your structural identity, then we will have to redefine ourselves, which is unacceptable because one of us will not find fulfillment in the relationship”.

There’s a reason I believe your partner should be your best friend, and when I say best friend, I don’t mean the arbitrary title you give someone, I mean the person you know you can show the dark scary places of your life.  But, back on the unconditional comment, no love is unconditional.  All love has conditions but the conditions should be defined by the two people (or more) in the relationship, not across the board societal standards.

Thoughts?

“If I am not for myself, who will be? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”  – Hillel the Elder

There’s not much I quote from the many years I studied at a Yeshiva but I feel like today, this is an apropos quote for the current situation.  A few people come to mind when I write this, and if you think I am also writing this in your general direction, you are probably correct.

Hillel’s message is clear:  although we cannot only be for ourselves, we must be for ourselves too.  We should be advocates for those who cannot speak for themselves, but we should speak up for ourselves too.  We should not settle for the mediocrity that we find comfort in.  I particularly like the end of the quote where he asks, “if not now, when?”  Interpretations point to Hillel making this statement about studying Torah (the Jewish Law), that one should not wait to have free time to study because what would happen if there is no free time?  (Jeez, I know what that feels like…)

Or in the case of my situation — I say to myself, I will be happy when “_______”.

What goes in the blank?  Why can’t the blank be filled now?  I think it will be!

I wish all of you could read my former instructor’s note on Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense technique I studied with her.  She is Sue Garstki, of Krav Maga Illinois.

A bit of background for those of you, and I know you’re out there, ahem, Li, who don’t know about Krav Maga, it means “contact combat” in Hebrew and is the self-defense taught in the IDF.  There are several basic principles in Krav Maga, including giving no quarter based on the pretense that your attacker wants to kill you.  The other basics are using any available object as a weapon, do as much damage as quickly as possible, change from defending yourself to attacking your opponent (sometimes at the same time), and be aware of all your surroundings.

I distinctly remember a training exercise with her where we were in our dojo and she dimmed the lights to the same level as what would be in a romantic restaurant or nightclub, turned up the music to an unpleasantly loud volume, and asked us to spar lightly with our partner.  Now, amidst all this chaos, while you were trying to defend yourself from the blows your partner is trying to land, she would walk around the dojo and at random points, pull out a “gun” (not a real one, a training one).  Basically, she was trying to simulate being in a real life situation where you may be in a dark, loud club and “busy” (talking, dancing, boxing with someone!) and someone pulls a gun.  Will you notice?  What do you do?  Where’s your quickest exit point?

It’s a lot harder than it sounds.  As a result, I find myself counting exits a lot!

Ok, back to the history of Krav Maga and why I titled my post “Mr. Miyagi to an entire nation”.  Krav was started by Imi Lichtenfeld in a Jewish ghetto in the 1930s.  He was literally defending this ghetto from the Anti-Semitics in Slovakia.  He then taught the same techniques to what would now be considered the IDF starting in the 1940s.  He trained a guy named Darren Levine, his successor and the one responsible for bringing Krav Maga to the U.S.  I credit Sue, my instructor, for the “Mr. Miyagi” quote because I couldn’t have said it better myself.  Today, principles of Krav Maga are incorporated in self-defense courses for women (those four-hour type seminars).  They are taught in other militaries.  Krav in itself embodies techniques from jiu-jitsu amongst other traditional martial arts.  I like to describe the movements learned as your natural reflexes on steroids because most of the time, you are simply combining a natural reflex (like moving back, or trying to deflect a punch) with an offensive attack.

Oh, and there are no belts in Krav Maga.  There are no formal katas or anything to memorize.  Training with Sue was a battery of hardcore cardio, strength training, and basically getting the s*** kicked out of me.

Rolex.  Mercedes.  Hamptons House.  Black Amex.

I’m sure you’ve heard of those status symbols — objects or possessions that elevate the owner to a certain social or economic status in the eyes of those who see it.  I don’t necessarily agree with the concept of status symbols, but for the purpose of this post, let’s say I did.

Because what I’d like to discuss has to do with the status symbols and indicators that we use every day to gauge how much we’d like to be friends (or more) with a person.

I’m going to use an example that concerns two good friends of mine, S and M (and no, that does not imply anything dirty!)

S and I met back in May at a mutual friend’s party.  When I found out she lived really close to my flat in Chicago, and me being new-ish to Chicago, I asked her if she’d want to do coffee/brunch/drinks sometime soon.  We exchanged numbers and made plans for that weekend.  We hung out one time and I showed up for a drink to celebrate her birthday in September.  That’s all.

Now, M and I have been friends since childhood.  We grew up in Montreal together, our families moved to the same town in Florida, we went to high school together, and so on.  M and I are good friends and speak on a semi-regular basis and I see him every time I go back to Florida, without fail.

Last time I was in Florida, M told me that he knew S.  How?  They were both counselors at the same summer camp three years ago.  They had gotten along beautifully and had really bonded over their few months of working together.

So now, my really good friend told my new friend, “hey, I know Melissa Malka!  I love Melissa Malka!” and told me the same thing about her.  Since that trip to Florida, which was over New Year’s Eve, S and I have hung out regularly for the last month and talk almost every day.

What changed?

M’s rave review of her had “elevated” her status in my mind.  If M, who I love, loved S, than by default, I should love her too.  So – we bridged the gap.  We made plans, we talked about M, we laughed about his silly antics, we had girl time and there no longer was the awkwardness of trying to figure out if we’d like each other because we kind of took a shortcut.

This isn’t uncommon.  We do it all the time when we trust our friends to set us up on blind dates.  An internal referral from someone who is a good employee will get you a job faster than anything else.  We trust our good friends’ opinions over our sort-of friends.  We have these so-to-speak statuses for most everyone we know and we act accordingly.  Most of us, or at least I, won’t approach someone and try to befriend them just because they have a Rolex or drive an import, but we will if our good friend tells us “we would most likely get along”.

A while back, I was discussing this with a friend of mine and he shared with me a way that almost quantified it.  He had terminology and really specific ways of defining who’s opinion means more and who you would find yourself trusting and so on.  I’m going to ask him if I can post about them on here.

In short though, what I am trying to say is to just pay attention.  Pay attention to your status, your social capital.  How many people trust your judgement about potential suitors for them?  Do your friends try to get to know your other friends?  And, think about the friends of yours you tend to gravitate towards for those things to.

More on this later.

In an interesting lecture I was listening to the other day, the presenter asked his group, “what makes this chair a chair?  What characteristics can I take away from this chair that will still allow it to be a chair?”  A few of the answers were standard and expected:  you could change the fabric of the seat or remove it entirely, you could change the colour, and so on.  After a few suggestions, he asked, “what if I removed one of the legs?  Or the back of the chair?  What would happen then?”  I couldn’t help but laugh when I heard one of the participants say, “you’d get a stool”.

The presenter was implying that by removing the leg and back from the chair, it would lose its structural identity.  For the purpose of this post, let’s define “structural characteristic” as one that if you were to take away, the item would no longer functional in its original role.  To maintain structural integrity, the item must possess all of its structural characteristics.   What I liked about the guy’s response, was how quickly and simply he had redefined the structural identity of this now amputated chair.

The same concept applies to human beings.  What makes a person a person?  Medical marvels have allowed us to live without a kidney, a lung, half of a liver, and with an artificial heart.  Women get hysterectomies all the time, losing the ability to fulfill their biological purpose — are they still “women”?  Mentioning this to a friend of mine brought up a discussion about Ayn Rand’s objectivism philosophy.  Because I haven’t read enough Ayn Rand, I think I read part of one of her books a very long time ago, I’ll decline to comment on that.

My main focus is to ask, more importantly, what makes you who you are?  What makes Melissa Malka, Melissa Malka?  Some could argue that its the ever-present cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, the perpetual bed-head, and the lack of willingness to take no for an answer (yes, I do it, this was a joke).  Lately, I’ve reflected a lot on what characteristics about my life have helped to define, albeit temporarily, who I am.  Student, scientist, writer, aspiring M.D., girl, friend, daughter…

If I were to lose one of those characteristics, could I, much like the aforementioned chair be redefined and repackaged into an equally stylish and functional stool?  If I didn’t go to med school, would I still be Mel?  I know if I cut the hair off…I’ll lose the crazy woman bed-head aspect, so don’t worry, the mane stays. As for the other stuff, I’m quite sure I’ll be just swanky.

Also of interest:  Julien’s Blog

A client of mine, who works as a personal/life coach and I were having a chat the other day and I told him that something a person had said to me had really put me off.

He asked: “Why are you spending so much time and energy focusing on what he said, rather than focusing on what you have to do?”

I really had no other answer so I said, “You’re right.”

I believe that we need to deal with the things people say that bother us.  We even need to deal with the things we say that bother us.

So, yesterday, I initiated my own personal “no negativity” policy.  When I was asked about my classes today (chemistry, yuck), I said, “great”.

Am I lying?  No.  I think in time I will actually feel like what I am saying.  A study I read a while ago found claims that the simple act of smiling at yourself in the mirror, or in general, can lift your mood.  Physiology triggered psychology.

Now, I’m not saying that I still don’t get those nasty, niggling, negative thoughts that make me feel like I won’t get to where I want to go.  I still get them, but now I’ve found a way to manage them.

Enter the Monster Book.  Mine actually has wee monsters on the cover of it but the premise is this — find a place to right down the negative thoughts and get them out of your head.  Then, close the book.

Haven’t you ever seen those fairy tale movies that start when the “book opens”?  (There’s a scene of a book opening and out come castles and birds and butterflies — and monsters.)  But, at the end of the story, when the book is closed, the monster is enclosed within.

It’s empowering to be able to close the (proverbial) book.  When you open it to let the monsters in, you also let the other, previously trapped, monsters out for that moment.  So do it.  Let the monsters do their little monster dance for that little while that you’re pencilling today’s monster thoughts in.

Then close the book.

And open another — I’m currently reading Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett and The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.

Last year, I was enrolled in a course that focused on the theological perspectives of different cultures.  In those courses, I like to consider myself momentarily interested — I read the material and think about it enough to pass the class, but I don’t love those courses.

However, one concept in particular sticks out to me and I find it even more appropriate during a time like today when a part of the world has just been hit with a natural disaster.

The concept was mentioned throughout our study of Native American religious beliefs (did you know that they do not have a word for religion, instead they just refer to it as a “way to live”) and to paraphrase, the woman interviewed said that in their culture, they were taught not to resent nature.  She discussed how even the thunderstorms that destroyed their teepees and scared their children were valued as much as the soft rains that made their food grow.

Granted, it’s easier to say that from the comforts of my apartment then if I were finding myself homeless now in Haiti, but, the idea doesn’t just apply to natural disasters — it applies to all disasters. Even the ones we create for ourselves.

At the end of the day, we can either focus on the disaster, we can resent the earth, the elements, or ourselves for having “gotten us into this mess” or we can turn our focus on resolution.

The pretense of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, is that we are able to make quick decisions based on relatively little information and discusses the downside of stereotyping, with the upside of the other adaptive mental processes we use to do this.

In a more general context, this is a concept called heuristics, which is when we find simple rules to make good decisions in a complex situation.  In most cases, too much information can be detrimental to your decision making; it just ends up confusing you.

The term for that — where your excessive analysis of the situation leads to a) a lack of a decision and b) emotional distress — is called analysis paralysis.

In sports, its called a “choke”, in board games, its called “running out of time and losing your turn”, and in life, its called “cognitive distortion”.

Tips on avoiding this very annoying situation:

1) Mental tallying:  when deciding whether he wanted to marry his wife, after only knowing her for a week, Charles Darwin decided he had to tally up the pros and cons of marrying her.  Turns out one of the “pros” he wrote on his list was, “for companionship, better than a dog, anyhow.”  But this mental tallying of a person for the purpose of a life-long relationship only took a week — and the man had a point: generally speaking, it doesn’t take that long to mentally tally.

2) Blink’s point was that the decisions we make spontaneously, with little information, are often just as good/correct as ones given more information and more time to think, thanks to our ability to do something called “thin-slicing”.  You’ll have to read the book for the exact numbers.

3) Maya Angelou said, very succinctly, “when people show you who they are, believe them.” Often times, getting more information about something, someone, a situation, will serve to reinforce what you already believe, which may or may not be right in the first place.  When it comes to people, just remember that most of the time, what you see is what you get.

My advice to you — if you’ve got a spontaneous, super-strong feeling about something, follow it.  It will often take a while for our conscious cognitive processes to catch up and explain what our subconscious already knew.

I’ve been reading an enlightening book on learning how to be more persuasive and it discusses how coupling less obvious things such as rhetoric, and the medium you choose, with more obvious ones like timing into your argument, will make you a more persuasive person.

I decided I really liked Chapter 22:  How Media Can Help Your Message and so would write about that one.

But not the entire chapter, which would take too long to write about, just one particular tidbit about the length of e-mails.

Heinrichs, the author, writes that when you address a professional e-mail to someone below or at your level, its best to keep it perfunctory.  Whereas, when writing an e-mail to someone who is a superior, you should not fail to include your reasons for making certain statements.  It is unlikely that your superior will be justifying himself to you.

In the example Heinrichs gives, if God were sending any one of us an email, it could simply read, “CUT IT OUT.”

How this applies to my life:

On several occasions, being the bottom of the totem pole in the client-provider relationship, I have found myself writing more explanatory e-mails only to be responded with a short “Yes”, “No”, or lack of justification.  My (work) boss tends to respond to my texts or e-mails with no greeting and the most brief of responses.

But, what’s more interesting is that I never found this to be an issue. I never found it unusual that I was explaining my every reason for x,y,z, and getting squat back.

However, on the flip side, I’ve found it extremely satisfying when I e-mailed a client or the boss and told him simply, “I did this” or “I made these changes” with no explanation and he either agreed (or not).  But no explanation was required:  it showed trust.

With that said, this is clearly something that can be turned into a useful tool.  E-mail is not the same as interacting in person.  I’m pretty sure if I walked up to my boss and said, “boss, I’m doing ___ now”, he could and probably would ask why. But e-mail, especially professionally is different — wanna see where you stand with your partner/boss/assistant? Shorten your e-mails and see what happens.

Also: writing this post made me think of something similar that happens in romantic relationships.  I’ll either write that later tonight or sometime tomorrow.

Today, I thought this article on cohabitation to the extreme was interesting.  And no, I could not live like that.

(And not in any particular order of importance)

1.  F = ma is the key equation in Physics 1.  It means everything.

2.  When the weather gets colder, its much harder to convince yourself to go to class.

3.  Befriend your Lab TA’s as they are much smarter than you and will offer a wealth of knowledge if asked.

4.  If #3 is not doable due to your TA being a troll, make sure to have at least one (1) friend knowledgeable in the subject you find most difficult.  Bonus points if this friend will tutour you at obscene hours of the morning, before an exam.

5.  Organic chemistry is not your friend.

6.  In qualitative courses, there is almost no such thing as a wrong answer — argue, prove your point(s), gold star for you!

7.  Never lose your U-Pass because it will set you back $40 plus the cost of the amount of weekly passes you must buy.  $40 + $23(x) = beer money.

8.  If your professor says he will give you extra credit points for donating blood, always ask how many he is offering for the donation of plasma, bone marrow, and kidneys.

9.  When in doubt, always go with “C”.

10.  You can wear the same outfit two days in a row because your classes alternate, MWF, and TTh, no one will notice — or care.

And now — onto finals!