Eating Veggie Burgers in the Dark

My aunt called me a couple days ago to let me know that she had had an epiphany: It’s better to eat veggie burgers in the dark. A hippie my aunt may be—she’s a vegetarian, she partakes of protests, and she believes that if the moon is in Sagittarius then you should light a candle by your money tree—she had taken logical steps to reach this particular conclusion. Veggie burgers, she noted, were messy and typically dripped and crumbled all over the eater and said eater’s surroundings. If one eats his or her veggie burger in the dark, therefore, one knows not the mess created. A logical person might argue that even if no one hears a mess fall, it still makes a sound…or am I confusing my proverbs? The point is that as soon as the lights are turned on, this methodology no longer makes sense, the crumbs are still present as are any condiments. Her point? I think what she was trying to say was that messiness happens and if I have to close my eyes while it does, so be it. I can always deal with the mess a little later, perhaps after an enjoyable meal.

Pirates and Priming

I recently read an article about the mind and priming which stated that the human mind is extremely susceptible to subconscious influence. I had heard this before but had never actually experienced it until yesterday. As I was re-writing my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel (well, half-novel) I noticed a strange motif. Along with my plot lines that went nowhere and my overuse of pseudo-French names, I mentioned pirates in three unrelated scenes. And it wasn’t even like my half-novel had anything to do with pirates, instead, I remember writing the last reference and thinking to myself, “I have a genius idea, I’ll mention pirates for some texture!” Why I forgot my prior mentions eludes me to this day, but I did think (aside from worrying about my obvious obsession with naval marauders) that perhaps the power-hungry child hypnotists down at Disney had finally done it—they had brainwashed me with swashbuckling and witty pirates. Something about drunks who steal for a living and rarely bathe had become sexy and interesting. But this wasn’t the first movie (well it was the first trilogy) to exploit the mystère of pirates, so I started thinking that it wasn’t Disney, but some other, more devious (is it possible?) source who began to turn the negative connotations of stealing and ravaging into sizzling Johnny Depp. Was it, in fact, the human mind, in its never-ending quest to understand the unknown, that turned danger into something else. Was my mind trying to tell me something? Was my life (or my half-novel) so boring that I needed to inject it with cliché allusions to danger? Whatever the reason, I’ll be pay more attention to my mind's dirty little secrets when I try to write in the future.