"In a television interview in 1976, a professional football player was asked by the talk-show host if it was embarrassing for football players to be together in the locker room with no clothes on. His immediate response: "We strut! No embarrassment at all. It's as if we're saying to each other, 'Let's see what you got, man!' - except for a few, like the specialty team members and the water boy.""
"There is some evidence that poetry is partly a right-hemisphere function; in some cases the patient begins to write poetry for the first time in his life after a lesion in the left hemisphere has left him aphasic. But this would perhaps be, in Dryden's words, "mere poetry." Also, the right hemisphere is apparently unable to rhyme."
"Also, lateralization is found in the behavior of young children. They are better able to understand verbal material with the right ear and nonverbal material with the left, a regularity also found in adults."
"for example, could a computer in a conversation like this raise a new topic"
"The only objection I have ever heard to the widespread use of pocket calculators and small computers is that, if introduced to children too early, they preempt the learning of arithmetic, trigonometry and other mathematical tasks that the machine is able to perform faster and more accurately than the student. This debate has occurred before [in Plato's Phaedrus, in reference to written language]:
"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without its reality."
Recently, while being examined by a nurse practitioner who was checking my heart and breathing with a stethoscope pressed against my chest, I received a proposition. The NP told me that her husband would be out of town (out of the country, as a matter of fact) for the next three weeks and she would be alone by herself. She asked me my plans the following week. Upon my inquiry, she reconfirmed that she had two infants but she planned to drop them at her parents. Now, I'm always on the alert for opportunities, business or otherwise, but this was the first time a medical professional had pressed her case for playing doctor during a home visit.
I looked the NP in the eye and she placed on a hand on my knee as she leaned further in, blocking any other parts of the office from my view.
I have not dated that many women with dark chocolate or ebony irises. The NP's eyes were deep, dark brown. I don't have a palette of colors in my head because I'm shape-oriented so I can't readily tell you the shade of brown of her eyes. What I can tell you is that the eyes were the most friendly, warm, honest and open brown eyes I had seen in a long time.
The NP is cute. And I'm just this middle-aged guy, retired and loving life as I've told you many times before. Why would I be more interesting to this gorgeous brunette than her world-traveling husband and father of two?
I'm also an amateur philosopher, always asking why? Thoughts before action!
So there I was, reading the hieroglyphs in the tiny lines of the NP's face, in the shininess of her open mouth, the squeeze of her hand on my thigh, and asking myself what the meaning of the word "is" is. What IS cheating? What is the difference between providing comfort to a lonely woman and taking a medical examination at an NP's house? What, in my mind, can I place in a category that fits in with my philosophy of keeping up a barrier against allowing sexual diseases into my marriage?
More in another blog entry. I realize this is published globally and have to ask myself how honest I can be in a public forum where I'm the one sharing and you're the one taking all this in (in other words, I don't know who reads this and what they can do with what I write, especially when it's on the thin ice of ethical uncertainty). And besides, which ear are you using to listen to this? Are you really listening to what I'm saying or do you just think you do?
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