I always like to point you to helpful advice elsewhere, so here’s today’s recommendation: a good blog post about inviting “plus ones” and when to assume
your significant other is invited and when to assume s/he is not:

If your significant other is invited to a social event, and you’re really and truly not sure the invitation included you, then it’s acceptable for the invited person to ask. For most social events, it’s nice to ask both halves of a couple. But there are actually people in the world who are close to Max, but not to me – and vice versa. And it’s completely conceivable that they’d want to have him over for, say, an intimate dinner party with eight carefully selected guests, and I’m not one of the other seven. That’s utterly fine with me. If you host an event, you get to have it exactly like you want it.

The invited person should phrase the question in such a way as to give the host a graceful way to say, “No, that person is not invited.”

One may not pretend to misunderstand as a ploy to try to wangle invitations.

(The questions are addressed primarily from the guest’s perspective; I gave some advice for hosts and hostesses a while back, here.)

Don’t click just yet.

See, the blogger I just linked to is one I never would have linked to off my boston.com blog. She blogs (and works) under the name Mistress Matisse, and she is a professional dominatrix. And a good writer, too. (Mr. Improbable blogged a post she’d written once from Las Vegas, after witnessing a magician’s bondage-suspension act go badly wrong, which struck her as ironic given that she was on vacation trying to leave work behind her.) Her “invitations” post is, specifically, about how people in polyamorous relationships should negotiate the “and guest”:

If the invitation – either verbal or written – says “bring a date,” or “you plus a guest,” then the invited person may bring ONE guest without further clearance from the host. One.

You’re on your own if you read the rest of the blog, which I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing at work. I would recommend reading it, however, if you enjoy a good laugh, if you’ve ever wondered if there are sex workers who enjoy their jobs, or if you are fascinated by the paradoxes of human behavior.

For a while, my two favorite personal (as opposed to political, pop-cultural, or social-science) blogs were Mistress Matisse and an orthodox rabbi who has since stopped blogging. This struck me funny one day so I e-mailed both of them, pointing out that while our jobs were very different, one way or another we all told people what to do for a living. Mistress Matisse didn’t write back, but the rabbi did. I guess enthusiastic attention from a stranger feels more validating to an orthodox rabbi than it would to a beautiful blond sex worker, for whom it may be more of an everyday occurrence.

Salon’s Cary Tennis fields a question from a person whose problem is excessive impatience with other people, especially in workplace situations (meetings where it takes other folks forever to come to the point, water-cooler chit-chat, etc.). Apparently this is one heck of a Rorschach question, because everyone in the letters–which is the most interesting part to read–is so clearly projecting onto the LW whatever personality/belief/situation/disorder they’ve had to deal with recently. To one, the LW is obviously a Gen Y’er new to the workplace; to another, a sufferer of ADHD; to another, a classic Myers-Briggs INTJ; to another, a brave rebel against corporate mindlessness; to another, an entitled schmuck.

I tend toward the “entitled schmuck” interpretation, myself, but check out all the letters, or a handful, at least, and get a sense of the variety of responses.

The best letter, from Villagejonesy, contains this gem:

You’re impatient with long, drawn-out conversation, and you wrote to Cary Tennis?

Heh.

… is online here. It’s rather epic.

You can read a follow-up blog post, and comment on my advice and the whole general issue of how to deal with people who are WRONG, here.

Do you belong to a book group near Boston?

If so, how about having Miss Conduct as your guest?

As we move into fall, I’m looking for more opportunities to keep interest in Mind Over Manners strong. I think it would be a terrific selection for a book group–at every reading I’ve done, total strangers have been having excited conversations afterward. It would certainly spark all kinds of discussion among friends!

And if your group is willing to purchase 10 or more copies of the book, and if you’re located within an hour of Cambridge, I’d be happy to join you for that discussion, and talk about the process of researching and writing the book. So e-mail me, if you’re interested!

And if you’ve ever sent me a question about what to do about that annoying person in your book group … well, that can just be between us.

… it’s how you do it.

This is a little notion I’ve been playing around with for a while. It seems that, more than with most careers, a lot of people who “want to be writers” don’t actually enjoy writing. I didn’t used to enjoy writing, myself. Mr. Improbable does enjoy it, although he’s never defined himself primarily as a writer.

People get hung up about writing in a way that they don’t seem to about other crafts or professions. I’m not saying there aren’t lawyers who hate their jobs sometimes, or musicians who get creatively stuck, or pastry chefs who are delusional about their career prospects. You find dysfunctionality, individual or structural, in all jobs. It does seem, though, that ambitions to write lead to peculiarly tortured relations with one’s calling.

I’ve given advice to writers before, and here’s my new take on it: stop defining yourself as a writer. Think of yourself as an X who writes, instead. Writing isn’t a thing you do, it’s how you do it. We happen to live in a culture that practices writing. If you didn’t live in such a culture, what would you be doing?

Telling stories?
Explaining how things work?
Making moral judgments and rules?
Investigating wrongdoing?

Would you be the jester or the shaman, the explorer or the teacher?

Whatever you would be, that’s what you are. Writing is only how you’re doing it.

Part of what’s made me enjoy writing more than I ever have is that blogging has helped me understand what I’m actually doing when I write. I don’t tell stories. I start conversations. And I teach. And I try to figure out the world around me, and let you watch while I’m doing it, because maybe you’ll notice something I missed.

If you’re a writer, or want to be–what are you using your writing for? What are you, really?

Dan Ariely* has an intriguing blog post up–is it possible that chimpanzees behave more like economists’ “rational man” than humans do? And if so, what does this fact say about evolution and intelligence? Or, maybe–just maybe, mind you–does it perhaps say something more important about traditional economics, instead?

*Winner of the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize, along with Rebecca L. Waber, Baba Shiv , and Ziv Carmon, for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.

In good old August internet tradition, blogging may be slow here for the next week or two. Keep stopping by (or subscribe to the RSS feed, already). Once September’s in swing things will be lively again.

In the meantime, take a look at this NYT article on “sentiment analysis” software used to glean mass moods and consumer reactions from blogs, Twitter, online reviews, and the like. If I were getting my PhD today I would so be doing research on that.

May all my Muslim readers have a good and meaningful Ramadan.

Here are two of my favorite Muslim blogs: Muslimah Media Watch and Hijabtrendz. MMW is a great place to read smart Muslim women’s take on current events and the way those events are reported. Hijabtrendz is a fashion and entertainment blog for Muslim women–they also feature good Ramadan recipes.

… is online here. For any of you who are concerned, Mr. Improbable laughed immensely while reading the column, and insists that we frame a copy of it.

Wouldn’t you like to see Mr. Improbable live and in person, and people like Dan Meyer, who can no longer be satisfied speaking Danish and feeding his wallaby? Of course you would! So get tickets to the 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm at Sanders Theatre at Harvard University.

The Igs honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. Ten winners are announced at the ceremony, where they are handed their prizes by actual Nobel laureates. The theme of this year’s Igs is “Risk,” and the show will feature keynote speaker Benoit Mandelbrot, and premiere of the mini-opera “Big Bank Theory.”

There’s lots of other stuff, too. The Igs are a great night, and are one of the few events that really is fun for the whole family. (I wrote about the Igs as part of “10 Things I Love About Boston” here.) I hope you’ll come, and if you do, I hope you’ll find me and introduce yourself.

Here’s one of the short “Improbable Research” television shows, that might give you a bit of the flavor of the Igs, featuring an Ig Nobel Prize winner, the patent application of an Ig Nobel Prize-winning invention … and the answer to last week’s Puzzler.

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