Number 64
Peculiarities often arrive in batches of three, in my experience, just to make sure we're paying attention. Last week three things having to do with fetuses appeared on my radar.
First, I was startled the other day to see a new store in a strip mall called Fetal Fotos. I guessed right and I'm sure you will too, even before you get to the web site, which displays sample photos of little aliens in the womb. It's been a long time since I was pregnant with my own little aliens and maybe if I were pregnant in 2004 I'd want photos like these, even though now they kind of give me the creeps.
Second, Miss Manners helpfully writes in "A Womb with a View" that the correct thing to say when people thrust these (or any other) baby photos under one's unsuspecting nose is "Looks just like you!"
Third, a lady told me the other day that when one of her unborn babies was causing her discomfort, her doctor told her to spank it, so she did and it settled down.
What does this all mean? Not what you think, about me, anyway. You know how you see things that you're thinking about ~ pregnant women start to see other pregnant women everywhere, if you buy a new car you see that car everywhere, and so on. I have no reason to think about fetuses, not literal ones, anyway. Perhaps they symbolize something new.
Years ago I noticed another pattern of three unusual but seemingly related incidents within a couple of weeks that I couldn't make sense of; they conveyed no meaning to me other than a chance for me to watch my brain at work, which ought to have told me something.
First, I was visiting friends a few miles out of town. Their house could be reached by two roads, one of which ran by a sewage treatment plant and was best avoided. The girlfriend of one of the guys in the house was complaining that when he took her to dinner, he always drove by that road. She seemed to think he did it on purpose to spoil her appetite and thereby save money.
Second, another friend lived out in the country in a very old house that had an outhouse instead of an indoor toilet. When she moved in she had a septic tank service come out to dredge the pit. (Did you know people even did this? I thought they just dug new holes.) The old pit was so compacted that the vacuum hose ordinarily used to clean out septic tanks wasn't working, so the man had to poke around with a stick to break up the surface first. He said, "You couldn't pay me enough to do this job!" But obviously you could, 'cause he was doing it.
And I forget the third related story, but there was one, another variation on the same goofy theme, because I remember telling a friend about it. We were intrigued and entertained by the workings of the mind.
I guess that's why when I told him another time about a rather wonderful sort of spiritual experience I had, he said, "It's all in your head."
In the March 2004 issue of The Atlantic, Barbara Wallraff's column "Word Fugitives" is about an October request for readers to submit neologisms for "a situation in which you refuse to accept that the occurrence of two events is merely coincidental but there is no evidence to link them together." Several people sent in cute coinages (fauxincidence, wishful linking), but other readers pointed out that words for this phenomenon already exist, several of which were coined in the 1950s, apparently a heyday for new psychobabble (apophenia, illusory correlation, and Jung's synchronicity). "Apophenia" sounds like a disease, while "wishful linking" implies that there can be no meaning in this kind of pattern recognition (or pattern creation, rather).
Discernment, on the other hand, is a religious term meaning the use of reflection, meditation, or prayer to help one "sense the deeper meaning of similarities, repetitions, and echoes among otherwise random and 'coincidental' events."
The religious terminology clearly suggests that meaning exists and we may discover it, though care is required to discover it correctly. Psychological terms (except perhaps Jung's) suggest that whatever we do or think is without meaning, or that meaning is an illusion of brain chemistry, perhaps. The neologisms suggest play.
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