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.

Note: This post will float at the top for a few days. New content is below.

A few days ago, Mr. Improbable posted the following dialogue to his Facebook page (I’m reformatting it for easier reading):

Phone call received here 1 minutes ago:
Me: Hello, Improbable Research.
Caller: Hi Marc, this is ___ from ___. How ya doing today?
Me: Fine
Caller: Blah blah blah
Me: Do you have any idea who we are or what we do?
Caller: No.
Me: Well, it’s been… nice talking with you. Please put us on your “Don’t Call” list, if you have enough information to do even that.
Me: [hangs up the phone]

A few minutes later, he added this comment:

And now I’ve gotten an email from the man who telephoned. The email says:

Hello Marc,

Thank you so much for time on the phone! I found it very useful to know more about your company, and in the future will do research on the people and companies that I call so I don’t have to get responses like yours.

Rest assured you will not receive another email or phone call from us.

Warm regards,
_____________

I have to say, I think that was rather well-handled all around.

A while back, in a post about Asperger’s Syndrome, I wrote:

From some folks [with Asperger's Syndrome]–not all, but many–I’ve gotten a vibe of contempt for social norms and niceties: “Your pathetic social rituals are meaningless to me, puny human.” And, you know, I tend not to respond too well to that. But I wonder if maybe some people are, in fact, trying harder than I’ve given them credit for … And for those who really are treating social norms and the people who follow them with contempt? Well, if almost everyone in the world were going around insisting that something I couldn’t perceive is terribly terribly important, and I’m defective for missing it … I might start to have contempt for whatever it is they’re making such a big deal of, too. As a way of making myself feel better, and as a way of letting go and getting on with my life.

In comments, Carolyn pointed out that my description of this defense mechanism also applied to, “a(n apparently) completely different topic, the ‘God debate,’” later noting, “I have wondered why some of my atheist friends sound so hostile to religion, and of course it’s because they’ve met a few too many people who feel sorry for them.”

(I think there are other reasons for hostility to organized religion, as well, but let’s let that go; that isn’t what this post is about, and anyway Carolyn is a complex thinker who I’m sure realizes that almost any behavior has more than one cause.)

A few other commenters also noted that they can no more perceive God than people with Asperger’s Syndrome can perceive unspoken social cues, and agreed that this was a good metaphor.

So I brought up “ignosticism,” which is a concept I think more folks ought to be aware of. Ignosticism isn’t atheism or agnosticism–it’s the straightforward recognition that you can’t define yourself as a believer or a non-believer unless it’s clear what you are supposed to be believing or not-believing in, and that is usually not made clear. From Wikipedia:

A simplified maxim on the subject states “An atheist would say, ‘I don’t believe God exists’; an agnostic would say, ‘I don’t know whether or not God exists’; and an ignostic would say, ‘I don’t know what you mean when you say, “God exists” ‘.”

I consider myself a religious person, and I would absolutely define myself as an ignostic. If you ask me if I believe in God, whatever answer you get says more about what I think of you than what I think of the divine. If I already have a fairly good idea what someone means by “God,” or if I don’t care to know, I’ll answer “yes” or “no,” whichever is most likely to lead into a conversation that I want, or away from one I do not want.

If I’m talking to someone who I suspect is not of my particular spiritual bent, but who is the kind of person capable of having a calm discussion about religion and religious differences without coming all over defensive or trying to convert me, I might say, “Tell me what you mean by ‘believe in’ and ‘God’ and I’ll tell you.” (It’s worth noting that, no matter how friendly and non-snarky a tone one might use, there are plenty of folks out there who would take that statement as a direct assault and insult. How dare you suggest there might be more than one notion of what belief entails, or any difference of opinion about the nature of God!)

If you want the truth, and I think you can handle the truth, then I’ll say, “God isn’t something I believe in, God is something I experience.” And the people to whom I have said this either don’t get it at all, and we share a moment of marveling at the true diversity of human nature, or else they get it, and their faces break wide open with joy at finding someone else who feels as they do.

Today’s a chat day, folks! Join me here at noon EDT. If you miss it, you can click on the link to read the transcript afterward.

Our friend Dan Meyer, professional sword swallower and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine, is … well, really, where do you go after that? Of course he’s an unforgettable character. In addition to swallowing swords, Dan has a passion for collecting languages and exotic animals. From a recent Facebook exchange:

All together now! “Watch me wallaby’s feed, mate, watch me wallaby’s feed! They’re a dangerous breed, mate, so watch me wallaby’s feed!”

Speaking of awkward compliments, I sort of got one at the reading I did last week at White Birch Books in New Hampshire: “Have you always had such a wonderful sense of humor?” That’s almost too complimentary! How can you answer that in a modest fashion? “Why, yes, and I’ve always been terribly good-looking, too.”

I thanked the woman who asked it, of course, and then said, in essence, yes I have.

I come from funny people.

My parents were funny, and communicated the value of funny to me, in the way some other families are musical, or athletic, or intellectual, or political. I don’t think they did this consciously–I’ll be real interested to hear what the ConductMom has to say about this post, online or off–but they certainly held humor in esteem not just as a random good thing, but as an important good thing.

I remember the day it occurred to me, around age seven, that my mother was funnier than most people. We were living in Oklahoma at the time, and I was taking horseback-riding lessons at a local farm. There were goats at the farm, too, and I vividly recall my New-York-born-and-bred mother’s mingled amusement and horror at being told, “Don’t park under the trees or the goats will climb on your car to eat the leaves.” This wasn’t something she’d ever had to worry about in Queens.

One day, I asked her, “Why do goats have scabby knees?”

“They pray a lot,” she replied. After a perfect beat, she added, “If you were that ugly, you would, too.”

I suddenly realized two things: one, that not everybody’s mother would have said that, and two, that not everybody would joke so irreverently about something that they took, at heart, very seriously. (Prayer, that is. I don’t think anyone from New York City can truly learn to take goats seriously.)

Growing up, my parents and I used humor as a way of bonding, of dealing with our stresses, and perhaps most importantly, as a way of breaking out of the roles of Mom and Dad and Kid, or of Good Midwestern Christians, or whatever. We valued those roles, but somehow also knew it was important to subvert them, to create a place we could just be Nancy and Jack and Robin together. We did humor in a lot of different ways: my father of blessed memory was more the Borscht-Belt kind of old-school joke teller, and also liked to make observations about the oddities of the English language. My mother and I were not above physical slapstick, but were mostly fast and quippy–my mother, in particular, had a remarkable facility for sick jokes, a side of her that I was one of the few people to see. We bonded over “The Carol Burnett Show” and “M*A*S*H” and, especially for my dad and me, “Take the Money and Run,” which we must have watched a dozen times together.

We had a lot of private jokes as a family (“checking the map,” “now I’m a vidow”). Humor was part of our culture. It’s not as though my father ever took me aside and said, “Daughter, humor can bridge social gaps and help overcome psychological defenses, and I want you to think about that,” or that my mother was some kind of godawful Comedy Mom (“Go to your room, young lady, and don’t come out until you’ve written ten witty observations on the difference between dogs and cats!”). But somehow, I knew that being funny was an important part of who they were, and an important part of who we were, as a family.

I can’t even begin to speculate on why my parents were like that. Neither of them were close to their extended families, so I don’t know how far or wide in the family tree the funny blossoms bloom. Through Facebook, I’ve recently become friends with a passel of cousins on my mother’s side, and although I have certain differences with them (I rather decisively did not remain a Good Midwestern Christian) we all share a love of a good laugh. My cousins write some of the funniest updates and comments I get on Facebook, which considering that many of my friends are professional writers and/or performers is going some.

What activities or qualities were particularly important to your family of origin? How were those values communicated? Do you think your parents valued those things consciously, in a way they could explain, or is it simply something deep within them that you picked up on?