The Psychology of Conferencing

Every now and again, my life permits me some undeserved and unexpected joy. On my current trip to the Banff Television Festival (tagging along with someone who is actually attending - whoo! free press hotel room!) I had the pleasure of sharing a scotch with the Canadian correspondent for a famous hollywood-type newspaper. Mr. V is possibly the only person in my three years of hanging around this conference that hasn't made me want to grab them and demand to know how they can stand to live with themselves. Trust me... this is high praise for someone in the entertainment industry.

But Mr. V was much more than tolerable. He was pure delight of discourse -- someone born outside the Matrix of fake boobs, iPhone addictions, and $20 martinis. While most of the industry people my husband has introduced me to can barely sustain eye-contact with me once they realize that I have no power to grant them fame or fortune, Mr. V actually TURNED OFF THE RINGER of his crackberry when I told him that I was studying to become a clinical psychologist. He wanted to know how psych conferences compare to the gaudy showiness of entertainment networking... Here are some interesting comparisons:

1. Mr. V noted that beautiful young people often want to talk to him, and while this makes him feel good, he understand that they want to talk to his magazine, not necessarily to him personally. I have noticed that at conferences, I want to talk to professors/doctors who are "famous" or with whom I share a research interest. They rarely want to talk back. Unless of course I happen to let slip who my graduate supervisor is... then they are all ears.

2. Apparently, there are as many ways of "doing TV" as there are TV professionals. Despite the stench of gin and desperation, there seems to be agreement here that no one really knows what they are doing or why anything really works. Why is Wheel of Fortune a 3-hour long daily show with bellydancers in Turkey? Why do people cry when the get money on Dragon's Den in Japan, but the show never got picked up in the USA? Why, although Paul Gottlieb Nipkow has the first patent on a television-like contraption, can no one agree on who actually invented the darn thing? Despite the fickleness of our eyeballs and money, these conference goers all seem reletively at-ease with the ambivelence that pervades this industry. They make peace with it and still try to make and sell entertainment. However, in psychology, Freud is generally credited with bringing the science into the world, many psychologists hate and despise the man to whom the owe their livelihoods. But much worse, psychology proclaims to be a science, while all the while, scientists cannot agree on what seems like a damn thing. Psychologists proclaim that their research base, their theory, their mode of therapy is the key, the ANSWER... that they KNOW HOW TO DO IT! As a profession, psychologists are very bad at admitting what they don't know. Hmm... the only exception I can think of to this might be the rare breed of psychodynamicist who doesn't have a pickle lodged firmly up their rectum. So far in my short graduate career, I've been told by countless professors that "CBT is the only thing that works for depression," or "people with Borderline Personality Disorder are a hopeless bunch that will never improve and can only be managed," or "anti-depressants should never be given to children under 16." Psychologists proclaim their hypotheses as if they are truths with more conviction than lawyers. The one wonderful exception that I have encountered to this phenomenon lies within Dr. Art Caspary, who told me quite plainly, "If anyone ever tells you that they've got the answer to anything in this business, call horseshit and run out of the room!" TV people seem to know that they don't know anything and freely admit it, while it's questionable how many psychologists either know this or are willing to admit it.

3. TV people tend to be narcissists, psychologists tend to have god-complexes. Both are overrepresented on the addictions front.

After some delightful and witty banter, I eventually got around to posing a question that I always like to ask TV/movie people: Do you know of anyone in this industry who is using their power for good? Honestly, with the exception of Jim Henson bringing on Sesame Street, and a handful of educational/documentary shows, I really can't think of anyone who uses media exclusively to do good in the world. Movies and fashion prey on our insecurities and young people in particular tend to internalize their values in ways that leave them open to psychological and relational problems. Documentary makers take advantage of editing to further their politics and take advantage of people with alzhiemers to make them look like one-dimensional idiots (I'm looking at you, Michael Moore!). Even Sesame Street, the most psychologically researched TV show in history pepper their developmentally sound educational bits with advertisements for the latest diabetes-inducing cereal. After my rant, I think that Mr. V is going to need counselling. He concedes that no, no one is doing anything that is actually GOOD. Well, maybe a few people in Northern Canada or Sweden.

And then he brings out the spinach metaphor. It's true that no one is really doing anything good for us on television. But then why, he remarks, are we watching television in order to get our spinach? Why don't we just go eat some spinach?

Touche.

Mr. V freely admits that he doesn't have children, and that if he did, he would probably have a harder time justifying the monster from which he makes his living. It's remarkable that as a television writer, he actually watches very little of the box himself. "Are you kidding?" he says, "If I watched this stuff, I wouldn't be able to actually talk to the people who make it. And I have to talk to them to do my job!" Perhaps this is the most delightful difference between Mr. V and the Louis Vutton wearing lackies that surround him: he does his job to live, he doesn't live to do this job. He has perspective. And while I cannot shake the feeling that everyone in this industry might as well be working for a tabacco company, and he thinks that William Shatner actually deserves to be famous, we can share a knowing wink and understanding.

Everyone here is crazy but us.

I'd Like To Take A Moment To Tell You All How I Sprained My Thumb

Indeed. Today I proudly wear a thumb splint, a little something I picked up at the behest of the emergency doctor less than 12 hours before heading out on my vacation-that-will-not-die. It is a shiny metal, four-pronged contraption, covered in virgin-white velcro straps. It has bright blue padding on the inside, and nevertheless cuts into my chubby little digit. It is my thumb splint and it prevents me from doing again what I did before.

And what did I do before?

Well, I'd like to preface this by saying that I've been hitting the gym pretty lately, and that despite uping the weights on my flies and incline flies... that thumb stretching has never been my #1 priority warm up. I have recently made a return to competetive thumb wrestling after a prolonged absence to hitch-hike across the country to raise money for thumb research... Oh, and I'm so positively lately, every movie, play, standup show or psychology convention I've been to recently has recieved an overly enthusiastic two thumbs up! My thumbs are exhausted... Really, it's no surprise that what happened happened.

I pulled up my tight jeans too hard.

That's when I heard the snap echo throughout the washroom at the movies, and I felt the pain of someone stab the appendage that seperates me from the animals with a rusty knitting needle. I did scream. (No one came to my aid...) And the knitting needle assailant must have run off because when I looked down the blood from the puncture must have been cleaned up and my thumb was still, miraculously, attached.

Now, I've never given birth to a human child who was 4 months overdue. But I imagine that what I felt is exactly like having a 30lb screaming infant pass through a small hole that someone has dug out of one's thumb with a small push pin. I have been punched in the face by a grown man. I have been hit by a car while (helmetless) on my bicycle. I have been forced to projectile vomit out of my own nose due to an abcess on my tonsil. But I have NEVER felt pain, physical or emotional, that even came close to rivalling this.

It also makes it very hard to type on this tiny netbook keyboard. But I will never be silenced, Dear Readers. However, I do think I'm going to lose 5lbs before trying to haul my ass into that particular pair of jeans again.

Now to find a bedazzler to trick this MF out! Oh, and figure out how to drive with only my left hand!

I'm Tired Of Making You Laugh

Every time I re-commit to not taking responsibility for other people being "okay," I realize that I'm doing it again. One of the biggest ways that I do this is by not allowing any emotional tides that I am going through to affect someone else. They say that the Asian countries are super-polite in and overly communally focused in that people shove down their own feelings in order to not bother other people. Well, they ain't got nothin' on me, sister.

I had a shitty birthday. Not like absolute gorilla shit that's been licked off of a baby gorilla's arse and then re-shit by its mother. Not THAT bad. There were some kernels of undigested banana in that simean poo. But by and large, it was poo. My parents FORGOT my birthday. This is something that has happened several times since I was a teenager, with my Dad forgetting almost every year, and my mom only forgetting up until it's that day, and then somewhere between breakfast and bed realizing that she has forgotten and making some lame attempt to make me feel better. Once, this involved unceremoniously thrusting a cheque at me in the line up of a MacDonalds. No card... just, "here." My brother did his best impersonation of EYORE on my voicemail, and chose to repeatedly comment on how my husband was laid off recently. My partner, who is a delightful person, who genuinely tries at these things and knows what a touchy subject each trip around the sun is for me, was actually really sweet. He gave me an incredibly thoughtful gift that I love.

Wanna know what it is?

It's a t-shirt with a picture of the middle child from The Simpsons, and it says quite simply beneath it: "I am Lisa Simpson."

This simple phrase sums up how I feel on a day to day basis. In fact, change the rampant alcoholism for smoking in Homer, and you've pretty much got my family down-pat. For while there, I suspected that Conan O'Brien and the others were sercretly filming childhood in some creepy direct- psychological-observation-to-cartoon conspiracy. The similarities are EERIE.

Anyway, I had some people over on the weekend, and with the exception of one guest that I insisted on seeing so badly that I bought her a bus ticket, I wasn't really feelin' the love. Have you ever hosted a party only to realize that absolutely none of your guests has asked you how you are doing, or inquired about your life in any meaningful way? I feel like I spent the night babysitting introverts who couldn't figure out how to play duck-duck-goose while all the cool kids went in the kitchen to drink. "Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck... you know Jimmy, you need to actually say 'goose' at some point or the other toddlers won't have any fun."

The next day, I went to a petting zoo with my partner, and I could feel myself getting antsy... I was a bit hungover and feeling VERY thin-skinned about things... little things that don't normally get on my nerves were lighting fire to every last one of them. And when we pulled in to the farm, I saw lots of families carrying grocery bags of lettuce, celery and apples to feed the animals. I looked around the car. No veggies. I got out of the car. I looked around the farm. No veggies... I walked over to a goat and heard a daddy ask his little girl, "Do you want to feed a carrot to the pony?"

And that's when I started to cry...

Not only did my daddy not have anything for me to feed the pony, he didn't even call me this year. And my partner, wonderful as he is, had dropped the veggie ball on this one. I could tell that HE could tell that I was upset, and he immediately went into damage control...

So I made a joke. "Hey, are you kidding? These are the chubbiest bunch of geese I've ever seen. It's not that they won't fly away, it's more like they CAN'T!" Ba-dum-bum- CHING! Hey don't worry about ME... I'll make a joke so I don't have to worry about YOU being made to feel uncomfortable that I'm upset.

That's what I've done my whole friggin' life. Oh, don't worry that you forgot whatever incredibly important and special to me thing, family! My birthday, my graduation, that time at camp when everyone's families jumped out from behind the curtain to surprise us and you didn't even bother to show up. Don't worry about it! We can't have you feeling guilty or sad just because your little girl is down in the dumps. Besides, she'll get over it.

Wow, I'm a downer, aren't I?

Good.

I don't have to make you laugh all the time.