OF A GOLDEN AGE

• The other day my roommate Nathan and I rode the Blue Line L train downtown to see the new Indiana Jones and meet an out-of-town friend for dinner. On the trainride I was thinking about different styles of trains, most obviously evidenced by different door styles on the Blue Line. When I asked Nathan if he knew when the trains were manufactured, he pointed me toward a sort of dedication seal near the car’s back door. Apparently our train was put into commission in 1969, when my parents were 16 and 17 years old. I knew I rode the same line my dad did when he was in law school in the ’70s but I did not realize some of these were literally the same trains.

• Martin alerted me to Budget Hero, a surprisingly compelling financial Flash game from the radio show Marketplace. You choose objectives — ecology, fiscally responsible government, national security, healthcare, and so on — and choose budget moves that promote your goals. The game keeps you posted on how your decisions affect the national debt and size of the U.S. government. All theoretically, of course. (Hint: the unsurprising conclusion is that borderline socialism extends the life of our nation’s budget. TAX THE RICH!)

• My brother, it turns out, works for the largest company in the world according to the Forbes Global 2000. This is HSBC’s first year as ummmmmber ooooone*, after climbing the ranks from #5 in 2006 and #3 in 2007.

* a reference to Stephen King’s Misery, during whose opening scene a kidnapped author awakens to the sound of his “number one fan” proclaiming her love and devotion

a recent this american life had a dan savage piece in which he described a promise he made to an ex-lover who was, at the time, dying of aids. the advent of a new drug cocktail extended the length of dan’s promise from a few months to the next several decades. this made me wonder, have i made (and broken) promises? i’m sure i have but the worst part is knowing that i don’t know what they are. the breakees probably remember, the way i remember girls who cruelly teased me in junior high. i wish i could remember.

this american life this week is a rerun about dying words. all of this makes me wonder, if i died today and people looked in on what my life is, what would they think? what would seem consistent with the way i am, and what might come as a total surprise? we rely on our intuition to give us a real sense of what people are, because otherwise, my existence could be boiled down to a messy, colorful room and the half-formed resume of a twenty year old. thank god for intuition. and thank god for messy, colorful rooms.

john gottman, a ph.d. who studies married couples, accurately predicts a HUGE percentage of couples who will divorce. taken from a 2002 study by his institute:

“derived from post-hoc analyses of the data, we explore the idea that there will be two factors emerging from the data, one factor tapping a volatile affective style, which will be related to early divorcing, and another factor tapping a more neutral affective style, which will be related to later divorcing.”

he uses small populations, but the results are intriguing.

anyway, on the radio show, he also talks about gay and lesbian couples — he did a parallel study with 21 lesbian couples, 21 gay couples, and 42 hetero married couples. people responded on a questionnaire and they were chosen based on what they said was “high relationship satisfaction.” ira glass:

“they found that the homosexual couples were far better than the heterosexual married couples at bringing up an issue in a positive way.”

gottman gave an example where a man asked his partner who initiated sex that morning. his partner said something like, you know you don’t have the kind of body i find most attractive. his partner said, yeah, i know, but who initiated sex this morning? gottman asked ira glass if he could imagine a husband saying something similar to his wife and getting any response at all, let alone the cooperative response of the partner here. gottman:

“so there’s so much less deception, so much more honesty, so much more directness [in the gay couples]. i don’t know if it’s representative, but i was impressed.”

(gottman’s study was published in the family process journal. it’s a long, in-depth analysis of the study’s parameters and findings. here‘s the episode of this american life.)