The Monster in My Ear
How an aural invasion led to a meditation on what makes experiences memorable.
Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…
PSA: When does your passport expire? If you're planning to travel in Europe's Schengen region, then you need to have at least three months left on your passport after the end of your trip. We had to cancel a European trip because one of our passports didn't have that much time left, and there were no options for expediting that would get us there. This AP article has the details of a nationwide problem.
Tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova has been competitors and friends for 50 years. Now they're fighting cancer at the same time. This Washington Post "deep read" is moving and fascinating.
La Profesora and I adored Shrinking on AppleTV+, especially Harrison Ford's comedic turn. On the other hand, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was too long by at least half an hour. However, this NYT piece about Phoebe Waller-Bridge's experience making the movie is worth a read.
My Adventures with Superman on Adult Swim and MAX is a terrific, anime-inspired take on the superhero's early days in Metropolis. My son and I enjoyed the first episode. This Newsarama review gives a good sense of it all, and you can see the first episode in its entirety on YouTube.
Looking for a light beach read? Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen is a hilarious combination of P.G. Wodehouse and the Tiger King. I'm listening to it as an audiobook, read by Scott Brick. (H/T Pam and Peter Horan.)
This TikTok parody of Elon Musk is worth a look. (H/T Matt Philpott.)
Please follow me on Post, LinkedIn, and BlueSky for between-issue insights and updates.
Brief Note: I'm experimenting with Threads, the new Twitter killer from Instagram/Meta that has such impressive uptake: 10 million registered accounts in the first 7 hours, 70M in the first day, and 95M as of yesterday.
I have two observations.
First, the real metric for Threads isn't signups, it's Daily Active Users (DAU) of which Instagram has 500M (and over 2B Monthly Active Users). Let's see how many DAU are on Threads in a couple months.
Second, how is it possible that everybody is giving Meta a free pass on launching a Twitter competitor that exploits all our data even though the company takes no accountability for how it enables rampant misinformation (e.g. Cambridge Analytica) and increased adolescent depression and suicidality? Federal regulation is our only hope.
On to our top story...
The Monster in My Ear
What are the ingredients for a memorable experience? One recent event has some clues.
My scintillating compadre in nerdery, Benjamin Karney, and I have been friends since we were eight. A few days ago, we had a chance to catch up while he was on a long commute and I was working from home. I don't get great signal on my iPhone in my home office, so I grabbed my trusty Bose noise-cancelling, over-the-ear headphones and wandered up our long driveway towards the gigantic climbing structure in our front yard that my kids loved when they were little. These days, it mainly supports my phone calls with friends, particularly on beautiful Oregon summer days.
As I left the house, I felt something momentarily prick at my left ear. A few steps later, it happened again. I whipped the headphones off to glance at the left cup. Nothing. I had just replaced the cushions on the headphones, so as Ben and I were chatting a tiny background part of me wondered if I'd screwed up somehow and caused a short circuit. I sat on one of the swings. We kept chatting as he drove and I swung.
It happened again. "Hold on a sec." I took the headphones off, popped my iPhone onto speaker mode, and said to Ben, "there's something wrong with my headphones."
The next thing Ben heard was a loud scream of "Aaaah!" because this is what I saw crawling around inside the left cushion:
"What happened?" Ben asked.
"It's a bug! In my headphones! With big pincers! Yuck!"
My heart was racing like Seabiscuit on a quadruple espresso. I picked up a stick and used it to chase the bug around and around the cushion. Finally, I flipped the bug to the ground. It vanished into the wood chips under the climbing structure.
"It's gone," I said.
"Pincers?" Ben asked.
"Yeah, it was long and mostly black with gigantic pincers on one end."
"You mean like the things Khan sticks in Chekhov's ear in Wrath of Khan?" Ben asked.
My skin crawled at the too-apt comparison. "Thanks, Ben," I said. "You just made it so much worse."
It's worth sharing here that I. Don't. Like. Bugs. At. All. When I later shared this story with La Profesora, she observed that it was a nice indication of how much I've mellowed with age. If this had happened a couple decades earlier, she's confident that I would have required psychiatric care. In a rubber room. With meds. Lots of meds.
Here is what the "Ceti eels" from the classic 1982 movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan look like:
Yuck.
In the movie, Khan, the villain, sticks larvae from an adult eel into the ears of Starfleet officers Chekhov and Terrell because chemicals from the larva take away the recipients' free will. (You can watch the indigestion-inducing scene here.)
I later learned that the bug in my headphones was an earwig, an invasive species in Oregon that people mistakenly believe to crawl into ears like the Star Trek eels.
I'll never forget my earwig invasion. It's worth teasing out why.
What makes things memorable.
If I had been alone when I found the earwig in my headphones, then the neighbors might have wondered at the shriek coming from the Berens home, but that would have been it. I might have mentioned it in passing to the amusement of La Profesora or our son, but aside from later occasional night sweats the experience would have faded with time.
If everything about the experience was the same, but Ben had not made the Star Trek comparison, then the memory would have faded, although perhaps more slowly.
It was the three-way combination of 1) an unusual (and icky) experience that happened 2) when I was interacting with Ben in real-time, and 3) that Ben instantly contextualized with a pointed, accurate (and even ickier) comparison.
In previous Dispatches, I've talked about the nature of eventness (why real-time and shared experiences are more valuable than solo ones), so I won't go over that again here other than to point out that technology—in this case a mobile phone call–can extend eventness beyond two people in the same place at the same time.
In his 1991 book The Rationality of Emotion, philosopher Ronald de Sousa argues that using the word "emotional" as a synonym for "irrational" misses how we logically derive our emotions from what he calls "paradigm scenarios," which often come from the stories we consume. More recently, in How Emotions Are Made, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has argued that we actively construct our emotions on the fly.
Ben's Star Trek comparison did two things: it taught me how to feel about the earwig (scared and out of control) and it connected a fleeting experience to a long-term memory from a movie that I've seen many times and thought about even more.
Another term to describe that connection is Experience Stack, which is an ongoing thread in my writing.
When we work to create memorable experiences, we typically focus on the first ingredient (the experience itself). After the isolation of COVID lockdown, we're more attuned to the value of shared experience, both in real time/different places and especially real time/same place. The hardest ingredient and the one that gets the least attention is comparison, the connection to the past that then leans into the future.
But that's where the magic happens.
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.