Where Mind Meets Message

Several unrelated streams of thought came together last night, and they had me thinking about improv, the form of comedy where sketch acts are performed on-the-fly without scripts.

Some time ago I was watching a program about improv — why I don’t know — and they said that the first rule of improv was not to say “no.”

You see, that kills the sketch dead. There is nowhere to go from there. You have taken away all inertia.

And last evening I was thinking how well this lesson applies to all of life.

Automobiles

No one wants to be involved in an unintended crash. But least of all with a bridge piling. Your automobile has built up a great deal of inertia, and hitting a steel-reinforced concrete pier brings that all to an immediate halt.

Damage is maximal. Fatalities are likely.

Physical altercations

No sane person wants to be punched in the face. It hurts and kills.

So imagine that your face is hanging out, and all of a sudden, a giant fist is proceeding toward it with maximal velocity.

What to do?

In all cases, it is difficult to stop the fist dead in its tracks. There’s a lot of inertia behind that fist.

That’s why most martial arts teach redirection. It’s difficult to stop a flying fist, but it’s comparatively easy to redirect it.

What if it’s all about inertia and redirection?

Thinking about all of these scenarios, I wondered whether the key to life happiness simply rests in the concepts of inertia and redirection.

In a marriage–as with improv–a conversation has nowhere to go when someone says “no.”

But it’s so expedient. We all do it. A hundred times a month in little conversations that mean nothing.

Yet what if these simple inertia-killing “nos” have the same effect they do when crumpling a car, concaving a face, or draining the humor from a previously funny improv sketch?

‘Til death do us part

A marriage is yoked at the most crucial part of a person, the essence, or “soul,” if you will. So these little refutations might have far more damage that colliding with a bridge in the most protected “crumple designed front impact zone.”

Instead they come at your heart, where you’re most vulnerable.

And what if it’s just as simple as taking the story in a new, related direction, as in improv?

As a side note, we were watching the comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story last night, and one character jokes that he heard that Zach Galifianakis’ character was psychologically committed because he tried to rape a penguin at the zoo.

So I’m not saying that if your partner suggests going to the zoo to violate a penguin, you suggest violating a flamingo instead.

Clearly I’m talking about less substantial — legal and ethical — situations

I’m merely saying that if you replaced your goto “no” with some improv style redirection, your life might be markedly higher.

A non-example

My wife and I have a running joke about one day buying a motorcycle with a sidecar.

To be clear, neither of us has any desire to actually do this.

But on a somewhat often basis, I make the joke about buying a sidecar with an eject lever in case she gets too lippy.

At which time she protest that she’s not riding in a sidecar, and it’s funny and we both know it’s serious

Better example

To my knowledge, I have been on a sailboat once in my life, and I generally liked it despite the fact that I knocked my pre-teen head on one of the large poles, whose name I don’t event know … that’s how serious I am about sailing.

But in my heart, I long to retire and sail the world.

And for a really long time, this elicited the same reaction as the sidecar. But this time it hurt a little. Sometimes a lot.

Again, we’re yoked at our dreams.

Then one day that changed. One day she said something akin to:

“Instead of just buying an expensive sailboat someday, why don’t we go on a sailing trip or take lessons to see whether we even liked it.”

And that changed everything.

So does that make me Gilligan or the Skipper?

Now it’s something that we both share. Not a point of separation but a point of unification.

More than a year ago, Emily was at a conference in Corpus Christi, Texas, and she brought me back a small wooden sailboat.

It’s one of my most prized possessions — it’s about four feet from me as I type.

With a simple act, she turned an inertia killing “no” into something we share and something that continually reminds me how much I love her and how glad I am that out 6.5 billion people on the planet, how very happy I am that my dreams are yoked to her.

So, I say to you, what if it really is just that simple?

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In preparing for the upcoming series, Working in the lab, I thought that I’d share some words of wisdom from the first-ever e-mail I received from my doctoral advisor, Annie Lang.

I arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, on Jan. 2, 2002 to begin a joint doctoral program in Telecommunications and Cognitive Science.

Working with Annie remains one of the greta joys of my professional life.

Thankfully I save almost everything, so I have a record of our first e-mail exchange. I wrote at the end of my first year as a master’s student.

She wrote back the next morning, May 18, 2000, describing her program of research. In this e-mail she outlines what I have come to believe is the best way to run a lab:

I do think that the program here at Indiana is/can be very rigorous. In many ways our curriculum asks students to identify their interests and needs and goals and then design their own program, with the help of their committee, to get them there.  For this reason it can be as challenging as you want to make it!  The basic Ph.D. core is, I think, a solid group of courses.

Since you’ve read my work you probably already know that a lot of my work was/is done as a team effort – with graduate students. I expect my Ph.D. students to contribute to all aspects of the research done in the lab from data collection to analysis to coming up with ideas for future studies (not all of these at first but all of them by the end of your studies).

I like to think that my Ph.D. students, when they are done, are methodologically well trained, and theoretically proficient in the field in general – and then have their own specialties of which they know (I would hope) more than me.

It is always my hope that I will learn from my Ph.D. students, not just that they will learn from me.  I expect them to branch out, learn more, and share the knowledge they learn and use with the lab group (in lab meetings) and the field (in conference papers), etc.

…

My own work tends to travel across content types (political advertising, news, prime time TV, PSAs, etc.) and recently has been moving into other platforms from TV (audio only, computer display, video games, etc.)  However, my theoretical approach is consistent (limited capacity information processing approach) and my methodology is generally experimental with an emphasis on covert measures of processing.

Tagged as: college students, graduate school, Research, Texas Tech

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Having thought a lot about the history of capitalism while teaching Advertising and Society last fall, it was interesting to play Monopoly with my kids this week.

They grasped the minutiae of playing but did not really get it. We helped them buy properties and houses, and then they started seeing how the values increased.

I admit that I missed the moment my 7-year-old “got it,” but my wife said she saw the twinkle in her eye. Ninety minutes later, Piper had cleaned us all out.

Mostly my girls played very lovingly. They didn’t want to bankrupt anyone, and they tried to be sweet.

But that’s not the story.

The story is when Piper dropped a $100 bill on the ground. She asked Chloé, 11, to pick it up.

“No,” Chloé says.

“I’ll let you keep it,” Piper says.

Chloé picks it up.

Then Piper takes another $100, holds it at arm’s length, wiggles it, flashes an evil grin, and drops it like popcorn for her pigeon sister to fetch.

A few minutes later, I landed on the hotel I helped her build, and I didn’t have that much cash. So I offered the electric utility up for auction.

“I’ll give you $500 for it,” Piper blurts out.

“Piper, you’ll go broke if you keep doing that,” Chloé insists.

Again, she’s 7, and she just leans back, gets a smug grin on her face, wave her open palms over her treasure trove of riches, as if to say, “When hell freezes over.”

So she had no payday loan predation in her, but when she had the chance to rub a sister’s face in it, power corrupted absolutely.

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Clearly I have neglected the Weblog in 2011. Shame on me. It’s not that I haven’t had things to say … just no time to say them.

That said, I am working on two new series for the upcoming academic year. It seems foolhardy to launch academic-related series during the summer.

The first series will cover thoughts for undergraduate students to maximize their experiences at a research-intensive university. I’m really looking forward to it.

The second series will deal with the activities of my lab. Just the other day, I mentioned a bedrock article in our field (roughly let’s call it media psychology), and the student had never heard of it.

Both of these series will deal with advice I give all the time. But this Weblog will provide a semi-permanent home for these thoughts so when I forget a piece, people will still have a chance to see what I missed.

The lab series likely will launch first. I hope for the undergraduate research series to launch along side my first-ever teaching of IS 1100, the Freshman Seminar at Tech.

Looking forward to your comments.

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