malddebokkwah syndrome

Scrambled thoughts ahead...

Reviewing my notes from an interview yesterday, I tried to decipher what I meant to type when I pounded out 'malddebokkwah syndrome'. I'm guessing it's some French term. Mal de boquois? Mal de bas quoi? Here's another French ambiguity. Let's say you're at a restaurant in France, how would you order fried apple?

Other things gleaned from a day of web browsing and sitting in long meetings: Tinnitis is exaccerbated by caffeine, regardless of how the tinnitis came about. So if one's ears are ringing from loud music, don't drink coffee. I guess it increases blood flow to the ears, causing blood vessels to constrict and... that's where my knowledge of ear function breaks down. Oh the senses. Ears do so much more than just hear things. I'm kind of surprised now that balance is not considered a sixth sense. The ability to determine uprightness given all these confusing stimuli like standing on squishy or uneven surfaces is sort of remarkable. Bending over doesn't make us topple. This should be surprising! All of this is maintained by the vestibular system, which consists basically of the inner ears and some piping. And since a damaged inner ear doesn't necessarily impact conventional hearing, I think it deserves its own honorary sense number.

To follow up on recent thoughts on how we adapt to new roles, here's Don DeLillo on executives playing at being executives:

“There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.”

I thought of this yesterday as I sat in a “state of the institute” meeting and several document manager-types gave speeches that were straight out of Dilbert. Except that there was no farce! How can that be? For contrast, when Spectrum staffers gave presentations, they wore tiaras and sashes. I was telling someone the other day about how I felt I was playing at being an adult by dressing too nicely. At what point does play cease to be play and just becomes reality? I am an adult, so in theory I can only excel at playing at being an adult. Playing at being something is the product of stereotype, which then legitimizes and propogates the stereotype itself. Children play at being children, too--for example, baby voice phenomena well past toddlerhood--but not to the exclusion of all other zany games. So is the antedote to becoming your worst nightmare (in this case a mid-level corporate paper shuffler) to play at being other things, too? Children don't stay children forever, eventually the teenager game wins out, and then the college kid game, and so on.

So, well beyond the world of College Self, I empathize with DeLillo's hypothesized panicking executive. We've forgotten how to pretend to be anything else. At this point, is it even possible to revisit a former game? If I walk home to my apartment on the prosaic upper west side thinking I'm a squirrel detective about to snuff out evil forces, will that make me more real? Whatever malddebokkwah syndrome is, this hall-of-mirrors tail-chasing makes a good candidate.

oh yeah, I forgot to mention this marks the rebirth of this blog.