The .Plan

From Ben Stein, on the economics of love:

High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find you that are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

(Or, as I like to tell college students, the absolutely surest way to ruin your life is to have a relationship with someone with many serious problems, and to think that you can change this person.)
–Ben Stein, “Lessons in love, by way of economics”, New York Times, July 13, 2008

A Washington Post reporter explores the motivations behind an award-winning filmmaker’s motivations for creating a documentary about reconciliation in Rwanda.

In the film we meet Rosaria, who pulls up the hem of her dress to reveal mounds of raised scar tissue running down her legs. Hacked and beaten during the genocide, she now lives in a house built for her by Saveri, the man who killed her sister. Another survivor, Chantale, who lost 30 family members, meets John, the stooped gangly man who killed her father. He can’t face her; her eyes are embers. “Remember all your old neighbors,” she says. Yet the next day, Chantale begins working to build a house for another ex-con who confessed his crimes.

For Hinson, it was proof that the “transcendent filters through every aspect of life” and also that the world is really messed up.
–Gabe Oppenheim, “Acts of Reconciliation”, Washington Post, July 5, 2008

The story of the film itself is magical, involving some good timing and a series of providential connections. But the reporter also interweaves into the article a story from her personal life — a story about a fiancee who is immature and hurtful, who embarrasses her and steals several years of her life. I can’t give you the punchline, but here is a teaser:

The story ultimately appealed to Hinson for its reversal of the genre’s cliches. Instead of being a tale of African ruin and our reluctance to help, it was a “tremendously hopeful” picture of people learning to forgive in circumstances, she says, in which we never could. Hinson liked to believe she herself had learned something.

Two weeks after leaving Rwanda, in August 2006, the belief was tested. Her ex-fiance called, 4 1/2 years after their breakup. “I feel kinda crazy,” she recalls him saying. “And I still love you.”

The LORD casts a long shadow over us as the author of our lives and as the editor of our mistakes…

Maureen Dowd, of all people, points us to this gem:

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss. His decades of marriage counseling led him to distill some “mostly common sense” advice about how to dodge mates who would maul your happiness.

“Hollywood says you can be deeply in love with someone and then your marriage will work,” the twinkly eyed, white-haired priest says. “But you can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.”

For 40 years, he has been giving a lecture — “Whom Not to Marry” — to high school seniors, mostly girls because they’re more interested…

I asked him to summarize his talk:

“Never marry a man who has no friends,” he starts. “This usually means that he will be incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends. Since, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, ‘Iron shapes iron and friend shapes friend,’ what are his friends like? What do your friends and family members think of him? Sometimes, your friends can’t render an impartial judgment because they are envious that you are beating them in the race to the altar. Envy beclouds judgment.

…

“Finally: Does he possess those character traits that add up to a good human being — the willingness to forgive, praise, be courteous? Or is he inclined to be a fibber, to fits of rage, to be a control freak, to be envious of you, to be secretive?

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”
–Maureen Dowd, “An Ideal Husband”, New York Times, July 6, 2008

Re-orienting to the outpatient setting has been challenging. Most notably, my office does not have a window. I plan to remedy this with a bit of artwork:

However, as much as I hope it will work, it may not. Recently, Peter Kahn and colleagues studied the restorative effects of a real window vs. a giant plasma screen linked to a live, high-definition camera recording of the exact same view visible through the window (vs. no window at all). They write,

This study established three key findings. First, in terms of heart rate recovery from low level stress, working in the office environment with a glass window that looked out on a nature scene was more restorative than working in the same office with the outside view (the blank wall condition). Second, in terms of this same physiological measure, the plasma window was no different from the blank wall. Third, when participants looked longer out the glass window, they had greater physiological recovery; but that was not the case with the plasma window, where increased looking time yielded no greater physiological recovery.
–Peter Kahn et al., “A plasma display window? The shifting baseline problem in a technologically mediated world”. Journal of Environmental Psychology, June 2008