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Sex appeal
Wednesday November 30, 2005
One trouble with growing
older is that you stop being a sex object.
I was walking the dog last summer. A group of girls, probably in their
late teens, had spread themselves out on the beach, right across the trail. They
noticed the dog; they barely glanced at me.
I was just a grey-bearded geezer on the end of a leash.
The other day, I went to the bank I've patronized for 12 years. Most of
the tellers recognize me; a few know me by name. But on this occasion, I ended
up going to one of the younger tellers. She has worked at that branch for about
two years, I'd guess. Certainly she has processed my deposits and withdrawals
before.
I handed over my signed withdrawal slip.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “You'll have to sign that again. I didn't
actually see you sign it.”
I signed again. The second signature looked more or less like the first.
“I'll have to check your signature against the files,” she smiled
apologetically: “I don't know you, you see.”
I suppose that someone in her late twenties doesn't have much interest
in a male considerably more than twice her age. So she doesn't remember me, even
though she has seen me many times. I have at least a dozen deposit slips bearing
her initials.
Selective blindness
Jay Ingram's latest
book, The Theatre of the Mind, spends most of a chapter demonstrating
that we see only what we want to see. “Vision is not like a camera,” he states.
The camera captures everything before its lens; the eye sees what it chooses to
see. Ingram calls it “inattentional blindness” – that is, we miss things we
aren't actually paying attention to.
In one famous experiment in the 1990s, psychologists Daniel Simons and
Christopher Chabris told subjects to watch a basketball game, paying particular
attention to one or other of the teams. Part way through the experiment, a man
in a gorilla suit strolled through the middle of the game. About half of the
subjects completely failed to notice him. They didn't believe he had been there
at all, until they saw it again on videotape.
I'm often amazed, when Joan and I start reminiscing, how we remember
totally different details of the same event.
I'm often equally amazed when two people read the same book, and find
dramatically different messages in it. The Bible, for example. Some find it in
mainly themes of a God who loves universally and unconditionally; other find
only themes of judgement and punishment.
Based on their preconceptions, then, they identify a number of “truths.”
Does that mean that all truths are relative? That what each person sees
as truth is just as good as what any other person sees as truth?
Hardly. Because this very diversity of truths demonstrates a more
universal truth – the infinite capacity of humans for self-delusion.
As evidence, I offer the continuing conviction of a grey-bearded geezer
that young women should find him attractive.
Copyright © by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
To send comments on this column, email
Jim Taylor
directly. You can also receive Jim's column by email. Contact him at
jimt@quixotic.ca
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