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poop beetle: seratonin
6.2002
II spent the other evening watching TLC. It was John Cleese's "the Human Face". Elizabeth Hurley got a supporting role. I've been following her saga in nasty gossip reports from salon.com. She's so beautiful, I wouldn't have thought twice about her before. Being dissed by the father of her new baby has made her much more interesting.
This has been a really hyped show - if you're watching the channels that come after the HBO dozen and before the music network stuff. There were a lot of commercials so I flipped back and forth between that and A&E- they were doing an investigative report on plastic surgery.
Between the two shows I found myself doing face exercises. I think that's what I was doing- I'm not committed enough to look into the real scientific technique- just faking it at the moment, trying to convince myself the idea my face is falling is just low self-esteem.
What I found interesting about "The Human Face" was John played on a bunch of themes I'd carried away from some adult education courses. These are ideas that keep coming back to me- somewhere between "Social Hysteria" and "Social Biology"- those weren't the real names of the classes, but I can't remember + a book by Carl Sagan, called "Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors"
It goes something like this: What is now the instinctive, chemical brain makeup of human beings today was set- right at the moment "survival of the fittest" no longer mattered. From what I absorbed: Survival of the fittest actually refers to whatever animal lived long enough to reproduce and pass its genes on to what we are today. Which is why we die of cancer and other diseases that occur after our best reproductive years. It was passed on because it could be.
BUT- where this John Cleese stuff really resonates with me is the idea that biologically we are all programmed to be living in an environment where we can see and recognize all the people in our tribe/society. As humans we can rise above our animal selves and that's a good thing- allows us to be transported by foreign rock stars. Still. We're bucking under modern society. Maybe because we're such an expansive species. "If a little communication is good than A LOT much be better."
John Cleese says this need for face to face contact is why we came up with :} and :[. What I know about email is my husband went ballistic the other day over a client's use of the word "actually".
I think about this stuff in heavy traffic- the old-timey brain chemistry answered by these seratonin uptake inhibitors.
Human beings have not been primed for extended periods of frustration and fear. Fight or flight- it's not supposed to last till the Tobin Bridge.
