WAIS or Racist Party Game? You Decide PICTURE ARRANGEMENT

"When assessing the effectiveness of intellectual ability in an adult, one is primarily interested in two kinds of comparisons: how the individual compares with his age peers, and how he compares with those who are at the peak of mental development".  David Wechsler, WAIS Manual, The IQ Concept (1955)

Cleaning out closets I found something I’ll eventually e-bay: The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale published by The Psychological Corporation in 1955.

But taking pics for a possible listing, I came across a booklet called WAIS Picture Arrangement. It’s graphic art gold. Or, it could be a cultural anthropologic archive of the hegemony of the male discourse. Or a mysoginist racist madman’s daydream, or the waking nightmare of women whose husbands came back to Levittown with undiagnosed PTSD almost 10 years before Betty Friedan explained the mystique. Or, it could be a sobering wake up from the delusional good old days. Or maybe it is an indication that we have actually moved in the right direction.

How the hell should I know? I may play a gardener on this blog but I have a doctorate in some obsolete legal code no longer practiced where I live. A wise woman once said “No matter how cynical I become, it’s not enough”. I don’t know if she punctuated it correctly because this is oral history. Which this test also is because it must be administered to an individual subject by a professional who scores their oral stories.

But it’s no joke because those were the tests that measured your IQ – the whole enchilada when given to children. By the time you were an adult, and your cog was slotted into your particular slot on the wheel, we might still want to know how smart you were. Here is how we measured it in the 1955 edition of the test.

First, here’s a little context to the story. In 1955:

   ·      Rosa Parks didn’t like her seat on the bus and MLK led a bus boycott for more than a year

·      President Eisenhower upheld the use of atomic weapons in case of war

·      Elvis Presley made his first TV appearance

·      Richard Nixon was Vice President

·      Nabakov published Lolita

·      A First Class stamp was 3 cents

·      James Baldwin published Notes of a Native Son

·      The US homicide rate was 4.5 per 100,000

·      Einstein and Charlie Parker died

·      Flannery O’Connor published A Good Man is Hard to Find

·      The US performed nuclear test at Nevada Test Site (May 15)

·      "Millionaire" TV program premiered on CBS

·      The ACLU announced it would defend Allen Ginsberg's book Howl against obscenity charges

·      Kevin Costner was Born

·      Israel attacked Gaza

·      Brown vs Board of Education (1954) was one year old

Children were getting our IQ tested by the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (more later) to see if we were correctly pigeonholed anywhere from vocational school or veterinary school. If little girls were good enough at science they were nurses by 1955, mostly working for doctors who were good in science when they took the WISC. And now, adults were ready to be indoctrinated by the WAIS in the secret arcana of their place and their time. Spoiler alert: mostly white men called the shots in the US.

Picture Arrangements is a spiral bound booklet about the size of an iPhone with 8 sets of cards (each set from 3 to 6 cards in separate pocket pages) to presumably to arrange in chronological order; or perhaps to arrange in order to relay surrealist images to illustrate the subject’s acid-trip re-telling of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Who is to say really? Oh, Wechsler, right. The story card pockets have labels like  Flirt, Louis, Enter, Taxi.

WAIS instructions say to tell the subject about the three test pictures here in the first pocket called “Nest”:

“These pictures tell us story about a bird building a nest, but they are in the wrong order. Put them in the right order so they will tell a story.”

Nobody said chronological order because nobody had to. Regrettably, there was no other order in 1955. There was no postmodern narrative, deconstructionist blathering, Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, existential, surreal, or culturally anomalous, or other ways of telling stories. This was America. Chronological.

When I took the cards out of the pocket “Hold Up” I didn’t shuffle, but laid them out like a cartoon. I imagine this is the kind of order the 1955 adult would have seen them dealt. But I didn’t put them in another order. I just told a story - because one of the biggest differences between 1955 and 2014 is that we have lowed the expectations of test takers as well as test givers. And we don’t have as much time. So let’s get moving here. 

 “Hold Up 2014: Justice Prevails: Again"

1. Top Left:  (Flashback) The all white male jury just acquitted Affluent White Male Defendant (AWMD) of murder. As he releases the defendant, the judge explains that white privilege will someday be recognized in the DSM as Affluenza - a legitimate mental disability, causing diminished responsibility for hate crimes (which won’t even be invented until his lynching days are over anyway).  Meanwhile, winks the Judge, we’ll just have to muddle through defying that Brown vs. Education thing.

2. Top Right: (Clip from vintage pre-PBS Ken Burnsoid produced Biopic of AWMD narrated by the guy who narrates Frontline) Courtroom evidence poster later credited in local media as winning the AWMD’s freedom. Pictured is the artist's rendering of the man AWMD shot. The victim is dead because he was Homeless Terrorist Person of Indeterminate Race (HTPIR) in the 1955 equivalent of a hoodie. AWMD is a hero for standing his ground in the face of such a scary man, says AWMD’s Mom straight into the camera as un-shed tears glisten in her eyes. (Could have used a few more cards here.)

3. Lower Left: (Interlude: Existentialist Metaphor on the importance of repentance) This card is Albert Camus’ rough sketch of The Stranger in prison after the priest has refused him absolution because he’s not sorry he killed that dude on the beach. Meursault was a bad man. He probably thought the earth was older than six thousand years and he hated God and America. Believe me, the distinction in our story today is that AWMD is unbelievably sorry this ever happened. Let’s not quibble about his feelings wrt/ the outcome.

4. Lower Right: (Glimpse into the future of our characters - except Arthur Meursault because he’s dead and went to hell because he was unrepentant - from the post-apocalyptic year of 2014) What would have happened/has happened had not the white gods intervened create such a wonderful system of justice. That’s where HTPIR on the left and AWMD on Right. I mean, the right.

Fade to white. “FIN”

MAINT REQD

Désolé, la page que vous demandes est introuvable.

The Internet, in French

Doesn’t that sound better in French? Or more sincere anyway; like the page you were trying to  find in French is lost in some bleak wilderness and they’re beyond being sorry, they’re positively desolated they can’t find it for you. 

While I always admire sincere apologies, I’m kind of an expert in fake apologies. I have always been fond of apologizing by saying “I can’t tell you how sorry I am”.  Or “I couldn’t be sorrier”. But I recently heard that somebody topped that a while back. It turns out Rob Blagojevich said, when he was caught and/or convicted that he was “unbelievably sorry”.  Which I imagine he was about being caught. He was probably desolated about being convicted.

So, not to make a handbrake turn to segue, but I’m beginning to feel desolated about my car disrespecting me. It’s been nagging me for a while with this “MAINT REQD” light that is annoying for several reasons. First, it’s in caps, so it’s shouting at me. Second, it can’t be bothered to spell out the entire message so it’s lazy. For some reason being shouted about by something lazy is particularly annoying. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I’m unbelievably desolated by the rudeness involved here. Besides you wanker, I made the damn appointment with the dealer for service, so you can stop shouting at me. It’s tomorrow.

Then, in the past few days, I’ve developed another theory about this enigmatic message. Perhaps I’ve been too quick to judge my Prius. Perhaps the dashboard light is trying to send me another message entirely. Maybe it’s trying to hint in it’s deferential way that it’s ME that requires maintenance. 

But this surely is not news to me, my old Toyota friend.

It’s not like I don’t already know I’m kind of high maintenance. It has also not escaped my attention that I’ve got a backlog of what we used to genteelly call “deferred maintenance” when we didn’t have a budget to get that slow leaky faucet fixed or the termite inspection done. I need a haircut. I need to exfoliate the heels of my feet. I need, well, let’s not get too far down this road because I might want to stop being a hermit and make friends again someday and I don’t want it out there on the internets about how long it’s been since I had my cholesterol checked. The Toyota may be right to say this in CAPS after all. I have been wearing those ratty t-shirts when I take the dog to the dog park and I’m sure the dashboard can see the holes, the stains and the places where the shoulder seams are coming undone. O dear. I do require maintenance.

So tomorrow, after I leave the dealership and the dashboard is no longer shouting at me, maybe I’ll make an appointment with the hairdresser. Then, I’ll apologize to the dashboard. Je suis désolé, unbelievably désolé.  I doubt if the stupid car can speak French anyway.

Take a Break

All I want

Is one break

Which is not

My neck.

 - J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man

I have to be a bit pickier about breaks. I want a break that is also not nervous and/or down. Also, not a break for which there is a designated room, as in Employee Break Room where, for all I know, employees are either broken, or only admitted if they’re already broken. I’ve been there and I’m never going back. Besides, I’ve had my neck literally (not figuratively) broken and it’s now held together with some titanium sticks and bolts. So, I’ve got the whole bionic thing going for me.

But enough about breaking things and throwing china and cleaning possibly deadly spiders’ webs out of old cars and figuring out how to put stuff on e-bay to attract people with too much disposable income and an un-satiated lust for “collectibles” of no discernible intrinsic value. You know who you are.

Instead, let’s talk about the amazing weather and the lovely sunshine that is so warm and gold I can hear it whispering for me to come and bask. Of course, everything outside sounds like its whispering from in here sitting inside in front of my computer pursuing my eternal quest for enlightenment on the internet and pondering the wisdom of some of my bookmarks.

I need a break anyway. I spent the morning reminding myself that I can still craft a hella legal document, specifically an amendment to a trust document, replete with herebys and witnesseths and pursuants sprinkled liberally among the bold and underlined important stuff, and the stuff that is in CAPS just so you know it’s the most important in the hierarchy of importance.

So, then I made some sun tea and added enough sugar to induce an insulin coma and then my kombucha starter. Now it sits for a couple of weeks to ferment. The violet kombucha I made last month has carbonated the heck out of itself in bottles and a double shot adds a delicious sweet fizz to the nasty smoothies I make out of leafy greens, fruit and nuts. No matter what smoothie components I use I end up with this thick green mush that I will generously admit is an acquired taste, and not to be taken from a clear glass where you can see the sludge left behind.

I’m not as fussy as my roommate in combining smoothie ingredients and use what comes to hand. Princess (let’s call her that) flatly refuses to acquire a taste for my recipes and finally objected so strongly that I had to stop using mustard greens, the wimp. And, as Princess Wimp fancies herself a culinary wizard, she prefers to add bananas and avocados and often almond milk to achieve a nice creamy consistency, which I admit looks and often tastes better than mine.

I’ll use water and/or fruit juice and often end up with grassy strings of chard or stems of broccoli rabe. I also toss in a few teaspoons of apple cider vinegar, which tends to make my concoctions on the tart side.

Now, some would say I’ve always tended toward the tart side and I wouldn’t deny that in terribly unladylike terms, at least until happy hour was well underway. So I’ll now take my grey smoothie (kale, chard and pomegranate juice mix together into a purplish gray that is a slightly more appealing color than spilled tile grout. But I’ll be drinking it in the golden afternoon sun, taking a break from my labors and reading a good book.

Hit Lists

"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.”

― Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

I have been wondering lately about whether I should have a hit list. It takes my mind of wandering whether I am on somebody else’s hit list.  I realize, that as we get old we can’t keep up mentally with the pace of life and sometimes things that we used to cope with can unexpectedly  overwhelm us. And when confused, the best defense is first paralysis, followed by paranoia. That which I do not understand, I fear. Thus, I feel the need to start composing my own hit list just as an exercise in keeping my mind nimble.

As my 95-year-old MIL with dementia will tell anybody who listens, the Jews are trying to take her money. There are several problems with this, besides the fact that there are probably no Jews where she lives and she has no money. Those problems are, in no particular order: she’s crazy as a bedbug, nobody wants anything she has, if she had any money she would have no idea where it was or whether it was gone. Also, she can’t understand why the machine next to her bed rings and rings and when she tries to answer it by putting the speaker to her ear and the receiver to her mouth there is nobody on the phone. Her skill set has been whittled down to a few pretty rudimentary tasks like eating and peeing. Critical thinking went overboard sometime in the last century along with personal hygiene and table manners.

 But back to hit lists. I think we all need one  - even if we never have any intention of hitting, which I assert unequivocally that I don’t. Besides I have no personal enemies. It’s strangers. Like the nameless jerk who took two parking places at the grocery store, or the guy who used his snow blower to clear the snow from his driveway into his neighbor's freshly shoveled driveway, or the stupid woman at the dog beach who walked in front of me as I waited in line at the doggie water fountain and watered her dog first – like I was invisible or something. Too bad my dog is a lover not a killer or she’d have had her throat ripped out by a very salty thirsty dog.

 I’m not at the paranoia stage yet, but I do find it troubling that so many people my age lack situational awareness. It’s almost as bad as intentional malice. Stop parking your shopping cart in the middle of the frickin’ aisle while you try to find tarragon. The spices are in alphabetical order you stupid frail freak. Look under T!

 So much for people on my hit list.  I don’t have to engage in transatlantic flights of fantasy to imagine the kind of people whose hit list I’d end up on.  I don’t judge young men whose pants are falling down, but when they catch me smirking at their silly clothes I suspect they judge me because I have cat hair and quilt thread on my pants.

 Then there is, regrettably, the group of people who oppose vaccinations because they cause autism; and those who think a sever winter storm proves global warming is a myth. If such opinions are expressed within my fortunately very limited hearing range, I make my opinion known. You’re all idiots.

 Seriously, you people who take the Bible literally, you should think about this. Since scripture says death is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, it makes perfect sense that your life must be the fruit of the Tree of Stupidity. Also, I don’t think god-fearing people are allowed to have hit lists since you’re supposed to love your neighbors. So, love me you wackos, and I won’t add you to my personal hit list.