Self-Help for the Rest of Us

Back when I was in college, the career guidance office was fond of pushing a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?, which was allegedly chock full of helpful advice for planning a career and hunting for a job. I don’t know for sure, as I never read it. I was a carefree, the-future-will-take-care-of-itself kind of guy. Besides, I knew exactly what I was gonna do for a living. I was going to be a journalist. No, wait, a philosopher. No, wait, strike that, I was going to move out to LA and try and break into writing for TV and film. Or did I decide against that? That may have been the week I was going to be a graphic designer. Regardless, I was not big on the whole life planning thing, but I know people who were.

Thing is, they didn’t necessarily follow their plans either. Why? Because life gets in the way. Some other jerk gets promoted even though you did most of the grunt work. The company you work for was counting on an Internet business to invest capital. Your significant other decides that, contrary to his or her previous opinion, yak farming is a preferable substitute to your continued company. Your pet turtle runs away. Other people, in other words, are almost never cooperative with your plans, even though it is clear that your plans are by far the most sensible possible way the world could work out.

There’s actually a very simple reason for this. Other people are morons.

No, actually, that’s not true. Actually, everyone is a genius, and if they only saw things your way, they would certainly defer to your sound logic and reasoning. In fact, they’d arrive at the very same conclusion themselves! So how to explain the apparent idiocy? I realized the answer when reading an issue of Powers a while back. I put the relevant piece of dialogue up on our Quote-a-rama thread, but even then, I did not understand its significance:

“It’s like: How do I know that when I see the color blue — how do I know that you are seeing the same blue I am? It’s one of those questions you just try not to think about–“

The simple truth is, you are not seeing the same blue everyone else is. Color perception is an extremely subjective thing, and even though we can all agree that blue is the color of the sky and green is the color of grass, who knows what shade of what color each of us really means by those words? And these subtle shifts in hue shift the way we look at the world, so that what makes perfect sense to you makes absolutely none to someone who looks at a banana and sees the color you see when you look at an apple.

Having finally cracked this infernal code, I am pleased to announce that I will be publishing my own life-planning guide, entitled What Color Is the Sky in Your World? The book will provide examples and exercises that help you translate from one color scheme to another, along with special color-changing lenses (which I have acquired at a wholesale liquidation discount from an out-of-business 3D glasses manufacturer) that will finally give all of us a common frame of chromatic reference. A few examples of the lessons to be learned from What Color Is the Sky:

  • You are a former denizen of Wall Street who gets it into his head that selling books and all sorts of other things on the Internet would make a dandy business. You start the business, everyone loves it, Time names you Man of the Year. Just one problem: you forget to actually make any money in the process, and the value of your company drops 90% and you find yourself deeply in debt. The color of your sky is red — readjust your vision right away, but make sure you’re sitting down when you look at your balance sheet afterward.
  • You are an Australian individual prone to saying ‘Crikey’ a lot and shoving your fist down the throats of crocodiles. The color of your sky is a light brown. You’re pretty much harmless, so there’s no rush to change . . . but really, man, those teeth are not bee-you-tee-ful. They’re just damned sharp.
  • You are that guy who stands right in front of the entrance to the train and tries to cram your way in while the rest of us are trying to get out. What the heck is your rush, anyway? The color of your sky — chartreuse — is clearly preventing you from realizing that the train will not go anywhere until we all get off. Your blood pressure will thank you for getting that taken care of.
  • You are Kathie Lee Gifford and you don’t understand why the ratings for Live! with Regis and Anybody Else have gone up since you left to pursue your other endeavors, including but not limited to your relief efforts for the sweatshop workers who make your clothes for Wal-Mart. Readjust your vision so that the sky is no longer fuchsia, watch a few of your old tapes, and get back to us.
  • You are the guy that mugged me last November about 100 feet from a Temple University Police watchtower. You clearly chose your spot well, since the cops never saw you, but you tried to mug a graduate student, the form of life on this planet least likely to have any money. Once the color of the sky in your world is no longer green with yellow stripes, you will hopefully apply your keen planning skills to a more lucrative, and hopefully legal, venture. (You may want to talk to the Man of the Year, while you’re at it.)
  • You are Joel Schumacher, director of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I am still trying to figure out what the devil you’re looking at.

Clearly, we are at the dawn of a new Golden Era (one that will, perhaps, match the brilliance of the sky in Bill Gates’ world), and all it takes is one slight, teensy-weensy, itty-bitty life-altering shift of perspective. It’s a small price to pay, really. So pick up your copy of What Color Is the Sky in Your World? today, and —

What’s that? You want to know what color I see when I look up at the clouds? Blue, of course. Clearly, I have the proper perspective on everything. It’s the rest of you pikers that need to get with the program. So c’mon, get those Visas and MasterCards ready.

Locke, Stock and Barrel

I’ve always been fascinated with the uniqueness of our own experience — how the way things smell, feel, taste, and look to us is something that can’t help but be private. I can’t look through your eyes, you can’t hear through my ears . . . we have to use words and concepts that assume some common frame of reference. And the fact that we get our point across more often than not is a good sign that we do have some kind of common reference. But — as this month’s Humor piece points out in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way — there’s something unavoidably subjective and personal in the whole affair.

It should be no surprise that this revelation has sent many philosophers, focused on classifying and explaining everything, into fits and intellectual contortions. During the modern period, where the search was on for an indubitable and universal truth, something had to be done about this subjectivity. We’ve seen Descartes’ attempts to deal with the problem, and how they were not wholly satisfying. Next up the plate: John Locke, who is probably better known as a political theorist than an epistemologist, but who nonetheless introduced a couple of vital concepts to the dialogue.
Continue reading “Locke, Stock and Barrel”

Self-Help for the Rest of Us

Back when I was in college, the career guidance office was fond of pushing a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?, which was allegedly chock full of helpful advice for planning a career and hunting for a job. I don’t know for sure, as I never read it. I was a carefree, the-future-will-take-care-of-itself kind of guy. Besides, I knew exactly what I was gonna do for a living. I was going to be a journalist. No, wait, a philosopher. No, wait, strike that, I was going to move out to LA and try and break into writing for TV and film. Or did I decide against that? That may have been the week I was going to be a graphic designer. Regardless, I was not big on the whole life planning thing, but I know people who were.

Thing is, they didn’t necessarily follow their plans either. Why? Because life gets in the way. Some other jerk gets promoted even though you did most of the grunt work. The company you work for was counting on an Internet business to invest capital. Your significant other decides that, contrary to his or her previous opinion, yak farming is a preferable substitute to your continued company. Your pet turtle runs away. Other people, in other words, are almost never cooperative with your plans, even though it is clear that your plans are by far the most sensible possible way the world could work out.

There’s actually a very simple reason for this. Other people are morons.
Continue reading “Self-Help for the Rest of Us”

A Healthy Paranoia

Back in my college days (which are now embarrassingly long ago), my knowledge of con artists was limited to the three-card monte dealer a few blocks off campus who for some reason, always seemed to find a few marks among our students. Being a paranoid native New Yorker trained since my toddler days not to make eye contact with anyone, not even my stuffed toys, I never actually saw the guy, I only heard the stories. Despite the university’s warnings and despite the fact that the con itself was older than dirt, a fair number of students blew their beer money in search of the red card. At 19, that kind of loss is a life lesson, a reminder to keep your wits about you at all times. It’s also mockery ammunition for your friends for well into the next decade.

These days, working at a financial institution (and having a slightly unsettling fascination with illegalities), my knowledge of frauds and cons has grown to the point where I’m just one big knot of suspiciousness. I’m going to make myself useful by sharing my paranoia in the form of information about the recent spike in “tech” cons (cons committed using the telephone or Internet). With these types of frauds, there’s much more than beer money at stake. When it becomes common for someone to lose thousands in a phony online auction or their savings in a phony stock scheme, life lessons like these are way overpriced.

Internet and Telephone Frauds (including telemarketing fraud) are unique for a number of reasons. In face to face cons, the con artist typically needs time with the victims to establish rapport and build trust. They’re literally building your confidence in them (which is where the term comes from). For some would-be victims, this is sufficient time for their own intuition or common sense to kick in and tell them to pull out of whatever schemes the fraudster has planned. Of course, not everyone does. Moreover, people who have been conned in person usually have a description, paper trail, or other lead for authorities to handle whereas many “tech” con artists are impossible to trace. Finally, our three-card monte dealer and his accomplice, the $20 Rolex salesman, have nothing on telemarketers and online scammers when it comes to volume. Good telemarketers can make hundreds of calls per day and online scammers are limited only by their own bandwidth and imaginations. Anyone see a problem here?

The National Consumers League, the Consumers Union (the folks who publish Consumer Reports) and the FCC are just a few of the people who see a problem. They’ve started tracking telemarketing and Internet fraud more carefully in recent years. The National Consumers League, a hundred-year-old consumer advocacy group, published a report last year, which placed online fraud losses at well over $3,500,000. (Of course, they didn’t count the NASDAQ because for some reason, getting people to invest in online pet retailing is actually legal). Tops on the list of Internet fraud were online auctions, though work-at-home schemes and multilevel marketing cons have found a home online as well. Even the tried and true Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud is alive and kicking around online. The Internet is still relatively new, and as more people move online, the number and variety of online crimes will surely increase.

Telemarketers, on the other hand, have been at the fraud game for years, honing their skills. Many are nearly impossible to differentiate from legitimate salespeople (not that anyone who calls you during dinner should really be called legitimate). A study by the NCL puts losses to telemarketing fraud in the area of $40 billion per year. The FBI estimates that there are 15,000 illegal telephone sales companies at work in this country. While they may not all operate in boiler rooms, they’re all out to separate consumers from their money selling phony investments, goods, and services.

Here are just a few examples of the telemarketing scams that have worked for many years, courtesy of www.crimes-of-persuasion.com:

You may have already won — Scammers have used “advance fee sweepstakes” for years with tremendous success. They call of thousands upon thousands of winning “entrants” (not that the people called ever remember entering anything) to tell them that they’ve “won” a large sum of money or other “valuable” prize. To collect, all the need to do is send in a check or money order (or give them a credit card number) to cover the taxes, release fees, subscription costs, etc. Companies like these target the elderly; 80% of the scam victims are over the age of 65. In one case, a pair of telemarketers impersonated federal tax officials to bilk elderly victims out of $20,000 or more each.

You may have already been scammed — If you’ve been scammed once, beware of helping hands, at least those not attached to recognized law enforcement agencies. The bottom-dwellers of the telemarketing world are those who prey on the victimized. (They actually buy “sucker lists” with names of previous scam victims). They promise to help you recover your lost money – for a small fee. Many of these scammers operate under official sounding names such as the Fraudulent Action Network and charge anywhere from $200 to $1000 to “help” victims. At best, victims receive a list of organizations to contact about the crime which the victim could have easily gotten for free out of the phone book. At worst, the victim gets a double asterisk next to his or her name on the “sucker list.”

Boiler Room not starring Ben Affleck — Real life “boiler room” (they actually use rented space in reputable looking office buildings) telemarketing operations may have up to 50 reps each making 250 to 300 calls per day selling everything from penny stocks to gemstones to time shares. The best work much like three-card monte dealers, working to gain your trust with multiple phone calls. One ingenious operation called and gave victims stock forecasts until they bit. What the victims didn’t know was that the boiler room made 200 calls, they told one hundred people that the stock would rise, and the other 100 that the stock would fall. After watching what actually happened, they simply called the correct 100 and made another forecast, cutting the groups in half until they had a working pool of victims ready to invest.

Sure, knowing a handful of the methods that scammers use may help, but aren’t con men constantly coming up with new ideas, new methods? How are you supposed to protect yourself? Many consumer advocacy groups have free fraud prevention web sites on the Internet available for consumers who have been scammed or who just want to protect themselves. Many sites are updates regularly with the latest scams and the latest on criminal investigations. Visit the links I’ve included with the article for more information. You can also check with you local news organizations to see which frauds are popular in your area. Many scammers are methodical, especially if they’ve been successful in a given area.

The surest way to avoid being scammed is to not be afraid of paranoia. I’m serious. Ask questions. Press for more information. A legitimate salesperson should be happy to answer them. A scammer doesn’t want to give away too much. Here are some questions that will help you tell the difference:

How did you get my name?

Be very suspicious if they say “the phone book” or some other vague answer.

What is the risk involved?

If they try to convince you that it’s a guaranteed investment, hang up. Investments, particularly securities, always carry risks, by their nature.

Can you send me this information in writing?

If they tell you that you must “act now,” hang up.

Would you mind explaining this information to my lawyer?

Again, if they tell you that they can’t because you have to “act now,” hang up . . . loudly.

Can you give me any references?

This may not always be 100% effective in itself because they could just give you the number of the person sitting next to them in their boiler room, but if they can’t even give you that, it’s a big red flag.

New cons and frauds pop everyday and even with advocacy groups pushing for privacy legislation (itself a controversial subject), we can’t rely on the laws to stay ahead of the criminals. Each person needs to exercise their common sense, ingenuity, and self-restraint when dealing with con artists. They make big promises but in the end, they’re only looking out for themselves. Confidence crimes are aptly named. In the end, it’s your judgment and your trust in other human beings that is stolen. How much money is that worth?

Other Helpful Links:

Internet Fraud Watch
The Cagey Consumer

Stripped, But Not Stripped Down

We spend most of our time in the Comics section of Not News focused on comic books, whether they’re monthly magazines, collected edition, or original novel-length works. But if we go back to the definition of comics suggested by Scott McCloud (in a nutshell: words and pictures arranged in a sequence), there is one area of American comics that we have pretty much neglected: the comic strip, long a standby of your local paper and now making its way onto the Web.

Part of the reason for the neglect is probably a frustration with the modern limitations of the form — short, three-or-four-panel strips tend to lend themselves more to gags and punchlines than complex storytelling. It’s exactly that frustration that led Judd Winick, for example, to end publication of his Frumpy the Clown strip and move on to projects like Barry Ween and Pedro and Me. At the same time, newspaper comic strips have a far wider circulation than even the most popular American comic, which might reach about 100,000 people a month. Obviously, comic strips are doing something to connect to readers that comic books aren’t; their contributions to the medium should not be ignored, even while we keep their limitations in mind. Continue reading “Stripped, But Not Stripped Down”

Paying the Bills

Last time my smiling mug appeared in this section, I promised a discussion of how exactly we could go about paying for an education system that would do the job right. I was all ready to write that story for December, but then we had that whole wacky election and Kev just wrote one hell of a piece, which shifted Pattie’s article over to Policy and left me standing when the music stopped . . . so you got to read their pieces and I got another couple of months to think about the issue, which I think is a win-win situation all around.

When last we spoke, we were discussing the disparities in spending between distressed urban school districts and well-to-do suburban districts. My argument then, as now, is that it is patently unfair to demand that the Philadelphia School District live up to the same standard as the smaller, more affluent Jenkintown District when the latter outspends the former almost 2 to 1 on a per-student basis. I want to turn now to different approaches that are being taken to how parents, districts and states fund the education of their children. Continue reading “Paying the Bills”

Sim-ply Irresistible

Will Wright could probably teach the big tobacco companies a thing or two about marketing addictive products. In fact, I’m seriously considering reporting him to the ATF or the FCC or whoever the heck is handling that sort of thing these days. Well, as soon as save enough money for Walter to buy a hot tub so he can have a party so he can make some new friends so he can advance in his career.

Hmmm, I should probably explain what I just said. No, there is too much. Let sum up. I put this computer game on my Amazon.com wish list. My sister brought it for me. I played said game and pretty much everything else in my life came to a screeching halt. That’s probably not enough so I’ll give you some more detail. The computer game in question is called The Sims. It was created by an evidently sadistic chap named Will Wright, who had previously contributed to the decline of productivity in this country by creating the hugely popular Sim games.

For those who are not up on the computer gaming world (and I don’t pretend to be either), Sim City is a simulation game that allows you to build and control a major city from the ground up. You build buildings, design neighborhoods, fight crime, control the power supply, etc. While the Sim series has been enjoying tremendous popularity for ten years, The Sims has only been around since March 2000. However, most people who find themselves unable to turn the game off at three or four o’clock in the morning (present company included) don’t seem to mind its relative infancy.

Basically, with The Sims, instead of controlling cities, you control people. That got your attention. The game takes place in a neighborhood, according to the game literature, actually a suburb of Sim City. There are several predefined homes, some with predefined inhabitants. There are also other lots available for the user to add new homes. Your task: create or import new Sims (people) into the neighborhood, find them jobs (or not), acquaint them with their neighbors, and keep them happy.

How do you know if they’re happy? Well, there’s this slick-looking dashboard on the bottom of your screen that keeps you informed of each Sims’ needs: hunger, bladder, (you don’t actually have to watch them go, the bathroom scenes are mostly censored), energy, social, room, hygiene, comfort, and the all-important, fun. Depending on your Sims’ personality traits, these needs can move up or down pretty fast, and it’s up to you to direct your Sims to do what it takes to meet their needs. So, if your Sim is hungry, you can direct them to cook a meal, have a snack, or call for a pizza. But wait, Mr. Wright has thrown in another curve: if you haven’t directed your Sim to bone up on his or her cooking skills, he or she just might burn the kitchen down if they try to cook. Or, if your Sim hasn’t been going to work regularly, he or she might not have the cash to afford the pizza. I made the unfortunate mistake of directing a mechanically inept Sim to change a light bulb; the poor shlub was electrocuted. Oh, I should have mentioned, your Sims can die if their needs get perilously low. You’d think they would have put that in larger print somewhere on the box.

As you’ll quickly discover, playing The Sims becomes a race against time. You need meet all your Sims’ needs while still getting them to put in a good seven-hour workday so they can advance in their careers. Not an easy task, and the Sims’ get very cranky when their needs are not met. Sound familiar? Say you’ve got a Sim on the Pro Athlete career track (one of ten tracks offered in the standard game), unless you keep your athlete in a good mood, he or she will refuse to work out, a necessity in moving ahead or even keeping a job in that field. One of my Sims flat out refused to use the home gym I directed him to buy. Can you believe that guy?

Which brings me to what are probably the most addictive options in the game: Build and Buy modes. If you are so inclined, and your Sim has the requisite cash, you can build the home of your dreams or at least a reasonable electronic facsimile thereof. The standard game comes with dozens of flooring, wallpaper, and landscaping options as well as over 150 items to furnish the home. Believe me, I was knocking down walls and re-tiling patios until all hours of the night just last week. The kicker is, generally the more expensive the item, the better it will meet your Sims’ needs. Sims who sleep in the priciest beds don’t need to sleep as long, which gives you more time to battle their other seven needs.

There is no “end” to this game, no real goal per se, except to keep your little community moving along and keep the interactions between your Sims (they can fight, get married, have kids, etc.) into infinity. And to make matters worse, Maxis, the company behind the game, has started putting out expansion packs with more items to buy, more housing options, and more career tracks. Yes, I have one. The Sims: Livin’ Large Expansion Pack followed me home from the store one day. Freakish thing. Maxis even offers a Sims Exchange portion of the game’s website, where registered users can upload and download Sim families, publish family albums, and chat with other gamers. (Editors’ note: Pattie will be happy to learn that Electronic Arts will soon be releasing another expansion pack, The Sims: House Party along with a game that supposedly mixes Sim City with The Sims, called Simsville.)

From the web site, I’ve learned that The Sims is a game that’s very dependent upon the player’s personality. Having played the game (virtually nonstop) for the past month I’ve developed a key strategy on maintaining happy Sims (one that will probably not surprise anyone who knows me): multitasking. Listing to the stereo will boost a Sims fun level but dancing with a neighbor boosts both social and fun needs. But all this multitasking doesn’t leave a lot of time for decorating so my Sims live in modest-sized homes furnished with the whatever necessary items they can afford at the time. It was not until I downloaded a house created by a fellow gamer that I was apparently not fully appreciating the Build and Buy modes. This Sim home had among other things, forty bedrooms, half a dozen bathrooms, and a casino. I think there’s a reason this is not a multi-player game.

So before I get back to my pal Walter and his woefully inadequate social life, a few final words about this game:

  1. It should come with a warning from the Surgeon General and not one of those wimpy cigarette ones, either, a real one.
  2. I hope the folks at Maxis have had fun laughing at the irony of selling a game that depends upon the characters honing their efficiency skills to consumers who will likely spend hours upon hours at their computer while they should be doing laundry. Real funny. Ha Ha. (I will find out where they live, I swear it.)
  3. If you read too much into the game and extrapolate what it says about our society and our consumerist culture, you will begin bleeding from the ears. Just play.
  4. Simply playing Life when you were a kid will not prepare you for this game, you do need to read the instructions lest your Sims start dropping like flies. It’s quite like the game of Life if you think about it, if the game of Life were designed by mad scientists on steroids.
  5. If you do purchase this game, do yourself a favor and pick up a newspaper or call a friend once a while – just to remind yourself where you are.

Do You Didgeridoo?

The diversity of musical forms offered by the native peoples of the world is nothing short of impressive: From the Toltecs of Central and South America, who lull us with their haunting flute melodies, to the pounding drums and rhythmic chants of the Amerindians, to the water drums played by the Baka people of Cameroon, to the Australian Aborigines, who make instruments by blowing termite poop out of tree limbs.

Seriously. One of the most beautiful, haunting sounds carried along frequencies accessible to human ears comes from an instrument which, in its truest form, is created by hungry insects.

I’m talking, of course, about the didgeridoo, also called the didjeridu and, for some reason, the yadiki. Raw, earthy and practically subsonic, the didgeridoo figures centrally in Aboriginal music, and is a strong image in the culture of the Island Continent. Continue reading “Do You Didgeridoo?”

Putting Descartes Before the Horse

So Rene Descartes walks into a bar. Some guy walks up to him, says, “Hey, aren’t you one of those skeptics we keep hearing about on the news?” Rene, indignant, replies, “I think not!” — and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

All right, you now understand why so-called philosophical humor only appeals to people who have spent way too much time reading academic journals. But if all you know about Descartes is the famous “I think, therefore I am,” stick tight for a second, because I want to talk about why the thought process that led to that declaration is still so important today.

Descartes was a scientist and a mathematician as well as a philosopher, and he was tremendously concerned by the skeptics. They’re the people who go around challenging all claims to knowledge for one reason or another, saying there was no reason to be certain about anything. If you couldn’t be certain that the discoveries of science were true, was there still a point in the endeavor? And if you couldn’t be sure about the life you were living at the moment, how could you be sure about what happen in the next one? Skeptics challenged the authority of both scientists and the Church, and this was something Descartes desperately wanted to avoid. Continue reading “Putting Descartes Before the Horse”

Burials and Understandings

Death is a strange bird. No matter what you do, no matter how you prepare, no matter how well you think you’ve dealt with the immutability of the eventual demise of someone you love, you’re always surprised when it happens. You’ve watched the jocular weatherman’s five-day forecast, you see the clouds coming, and you wear the raincoat and open the umbrella and roll up all the car windows, but somehow you still get wet. Soaked. Sopping.

This is what ran through my head as I was mopping tears off my cheeks a few weeks ago, and looking down at my cat, who had just expired on a stainless steel table in a veterinarian’s office. Since the night before, when I found her in front of our other cat’s water bowl, suddenly underweight and stinking of litterbox, I knew there was something rotten in the state of Mavis.

When I took her to the vet and he said immediately that she was critically ill, I knew I was going to have to make The Decision. When he prodded her kidneys and said he couldn’t tell them apart from the other organs, I knew I’d be driving home alone. When he showed me the x-ray, and told me her kidneys had somehow ballooned to the size of lemons when they should be about as big as a pair of dried apricots, I gulped and made the final arrangements in my head: Someone who has been my roommate for the past three years is going to die.

I’d known it all day, and I’d gone to bed thinking it the night before. I didn’t hide from the truth; in general, I’m naturally pessimistic and cynical to the point of wondering if the whole universe is just a big joke on me, so I wasn’t expecting any miracles. I was emotionally prepared for this. I opened the umbrella.

I got soaked.

Since then, I’ve thought of Mavis’s last minutes, prodded and probed and punctured on a cold table with a glass rod full of mercury in her rectum. I’ve thought about how she yowled when the technicians had to push on her bladder to make her pee in a vial. I’ve thought about how she yowled louder when the vet wrapped a tourniquet around her foreleg because he couldn’t find a vein. I’ve thought about how melodramatic I must have seemed afterward, slumping over the table and blubbering into her fur, even though I was still alive and comfortable and it was Mavis who had spent the last hour on a table in a lab, excreting water faster than she could drink it and facing the business ends of needles and rectal thermometers and unfamiliar fingers.

I thought of the signs of her illness that I should’ve seen but didn’t. I was changing the kitty-litter twice as much as usual; I’d just figured Mavis had developed some sort of litterbox treaty with Simba, the other cat, who she normally hated. Mavis started peeing when I was in the room, something she — a former stray — had always been too defensive to do; I thought maybe she was finally letting her guard down around me. I thought of how she had seemed just a little too uninterested in me, or food, or anything, over the past few weeks.

But I also thought of the time when she brought a sparrow, squawking like the Dickens, from the balcony and placed it in front of me in the bathroom and then sat there proudly, maybe waiting for me to stick it to the fridge with a magnet or something. When the sparrow tried to hop away, she would bat it down with a paw, then look at me again, with the same I-done-a-good-job-boss look on her face, like I was a Casa Nostra boss and she an up-and-coming kneecap-breaker.

And the times when she would curl up in bed next to my head and purr loudly and sometimes knead the pillow, tearing the pillowcase to shreds, and I would say “DAMMIT MAVIS I am trying to SLEEP!” and she wouldn’t move and I would roll over with plans to unceremoniously chuck her onto the floor, and she’d look all adorable with her eyes shut and her little paws working, and I’d lose my nerve and sleep on the couch.

And on warm nights when she would sit on the balcony waiting for me to come home, and meow like crazy when she saw me rounding the corner of the house, then be at the door when I opened it and practically fall out onto my feet.

And the time when she first came into my life, when I sat on my front stoop with a bowl of Bumblebee tuna and she ate the whole thing, and I tried to coax her upstairs into my apartment but she decided she’d rather curl up in my lap right there, and we enjoyed the warm night and said hi to passing neighbors. She came to live with me a few nights later.

These memories were better, and greater in volume than the one where she sat dehydrated on the vet’s table.

That’s the secret. You can’t prepare yourself for someone’s death. You can’t. Just forget about it, Kemosabe, ’cause it ain’t gonna happen. Even if Grandpa has been hooked up to machines for a year, you’ll still sob like a toddler when he finally goes away. No matter how waterproof the mackintosh, you’ll get wet.

But you can prepare yourself for the aftermath. You can dry off, eventually. You can’t help it. If you love someone, you’re prepared to dry. You’ve already got the memories, the mental Polaroids of how they looked when they were asleep, how they smiled when you bought them presents, how they laminated that cover of George magazine with the cast of The West Wing on it for you, how they talked about you in the acknowledgements of their dissertation. How they told you how great you are just at the time when you were feeling like a royal putz.

Last year, my grandmother was in the hospital, and my mother called me and said it might be a good idea for me to come home. She wasn’t responding to the medication the doctors were giving her, and she could barely sit up in bed. Soon after I got to the hospital, the medicine started working, and a few days later she went home. Nobody said the obvious: We were all terribly scared those would be our last moments with her.

Until Mavis died, I thought that I was prepared for my grandmother’s death, that when it finally happens, I would take it a bit easier, since I had been through the emotions before.

Now I know I’m wrong. When my grandmother passes on, I’ll be a wreck. There’s nothing I can do to get ready. It’ll hit me like a tidal wave, and pull me under for days, weeks, months.

But you can bet I’ll remember the hug she gave me that day at the hospital, after I had driven four hours in a rental Toyota because a reckless driver had totaled my Oldsmobile a few days before. It wasn’t the hug of a 75-year-old diabetic woman hooked up to a saline IV. It was the hug of a Navy SEAL leaving his family before a suicide mission, of a slave hugging her brother before the slavers dragged him to the auction block. Of a grandmother hugging her grandson who she feared desperately that she might not see before she died.

I’ll remember that hug, just as I’ll remember the last nuzzle Mavis gave my hand in the waiting room of the vet’s office. That hug, and that nuzzle, are what drags me out from under the riptide.

Mavis is dead now, and I’m still wet. Soaked. I’ll be that way for a while.

The secret is getting dry.