Happy Nineteen

This past month contained my and Amy's 19th wedding anniversary. Can you believe that? It was 1994 when we and a bunch of friends and family trudged out to the sweltering woods outside of Three Rivers, Michigan, and tied the knot at a little Latvian cultural day camp called Garazers (which our invitation designer insisted on pronouncing “Gazzazaps”). And now, almost two decades later, we celebrated by dropping off our daughter at her grandparents' house, hitting a Chinese buffet, and then going home to read for an hour in utter and complete silence. It was awesome.

But while we were scarfing down sushi, we did take a little time to talk and reflect, and one of the things we discussed was how we’ve managed to last so long. Not that we're particularly surprised by it, but more that in the world around us, it seems like less and less marriages do. Not many first marriages, anyway. And high school sweethearts, as we happen to be, are even rarer. So what did we do right? And I have to preface this by stating that we in no way consider ourselves "gooder at marriaging" than anybody else, or that we're just "more in love" than other couples. We just noticed that we’ve had a few factors in our life together that have conspired to get us to this point. I'll enumerate them now...

First of all, we were friends first. As clichéd as that sounds, I think that really is the most reliable way to form a lasting relationship. Like I mentioned, it was in high school. She thought I was nerdy and cute, I thought she was funny and pretty and was clearly a great friend to have. And even though it took a little over six years from the day we met to the day that would later necessitate celebrating a nineteen-year anniversary, we spent the first three and a half years of that courtship setting up a great friendship. That hasn't changed, as it does with all the best friendships. We still say things that the other finds funny and surprising and supportive on a daily basis. If you've got a friend like that, you’d better hang on to them.

Next -- and this reason is central enough that it affects the rest of the reasons -- we couldn't get pregnant, and it took over ten years of work and sacrifice to actually get it to happen. As terrible as it was at the time, it gave us plenty of time to figure out who we were -- not just as a couple but as individuals -- before we started introducing brand new little people into the mix. We went through a whole lot of stuff in those thirteen years; illness, bankruptcy, infertility ... now I can see that it all made us stronger, that each little victory was adding another brick to the foundation of the team we've become. If we had also been dealing with young children at the time, it would have been immeasurably harder.

When you become a half of a couple, there's less room to give priority to your own wants and needs. There's another person to consider in every decision you make, major to minor. And then, when a child comes along, your own ego and selfishness has to be pushed even further into the backseat. If your relationship up front isn't solid, the chances that you'll be able to continue to live with each other goes down. Maybe (hopefully) not by much, but it does go down.

Another major decision that we made before little folks became a factor was our careers. I had been working at Borders since shortly after we got married, and by the time the century changed, I knew that it was where I wanted to stay as long as I possibly could. And after going through several jobs, Amy decided that what she really wanted to be was a stay-at-home mom. It was really her dedication and refusal to give up -- combined with my improved health insurance when I successfully lobbied to get back into Borders after being outsourced -- that made it possible for us to jump through the necessary medical hoops to make our dreams of parenthood come true.

Lastly, and maybe even most importantly, is the fact that we have differing opinions on a lot of things, and we don't necessarily feel the need to convert the other person. It's something that I attribute to our first getting to know each other when we were still teenagers. When you go through your late teens and early twenties, you suddenly find yourself in successively larger worlds, moving from high school to college to career to full-scale independence. You change a lot in those years, mentally speaking, and your worldview and how you see your place in the Universe really gets solidified during that time. We went through that side by side, and eventually came out with differing ideas about things. For example, Amy's a Creationist, and I'm a believer in evolution. Every now and again this becomes something we discuss, but for the most part it doesn't come up, and because of that it demonstrates to us, I think, how unnecessary it is for people with such different beliefs and ideas to hold animosity for the other. The journey toward your own personal truth is a slow, gradual realization, and having someone by your side who is going through that same journey, no matter where it leads, is something that's supremely valuable.

There. I think I've managed to sound sufficiently smug and superior for one entry. Seriously, I don't think that we have all the answers, in fact I know we don't. We're just two people who lucked into meeting someone we're incredibly compatible with, fell in love, and had faith in that and stuck with it even when things got rough, even really really rough. Outside the world of romantic fairy tales, that's the true heart of a couple's relationship: the dedication and work that it takes, the self-sacrifice and faith in the other person. I guess that's the takeaway here.

To wrap up, let me re-dedicate this site to my wife, Amy, who has stuck by me (and been stuck to by me) for the last nineteen years. We've got a long way to go, and I'm glad she'll be the one to make the journey with me.

The Existential Horror of Temple Run 2

The tablet game that I've spent the most time playing in the last few months is Temple Run 2. For those of you who haven't had the sheer adrenaline rush of playing it, here's a brief explanation of the game, which at first does little to belie the soul-crushing implications of the game itself:

Temple Run 2 (as in the original Temple Run game, just with better graphics and more bells and whistles) takes its cue from the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford gets chased by a giant rolling boulder after stealing a golden idol from an ancient Peruvian temple, thereby setting off all the ancient traps and obstacles -- that are all somehow still in working order – meant to prevent him from leaving with it.

In the game, you play another intrepid explorer (one of several you can unlock after achieving high scores of one kind or another) who has stolen a golden idol and now has to run... the difference here is that you're running down a series of vertiginous bridges above a misty mountain valley below, turning, jumping, ducking, and leaning to avoid fires, spinning spike wheels and crumbling sections of bridge. The point is to run as far as you can, picking up as many coins that are lying around as you can -- they help you unlock special powers and buy new characters.

The big change from the Raiders scenario here is that, instead of a giant boulder, you're being pursued by a twelve-foot galloping monkey demon who is inexplicably wearing a skull mask (at least, I really really hope it's a mask). As if you didn't have to worry about plummeting to your death or slamming into trees and low overpasses, when you stumble over too many obstacles the monkey catches up with you and slams you on the ground. In any event, it's game over.

You see all this from a vantage point above and behind your running explorer, so you don't actually see the galloping monkey demon for most of the game. Only when you hit one of those stumbling obstacles do you actually see its hairy back and grasping arms, coming up behind you. That's when you know that you had better not even so much as misstep again, or you're going to get bodyslammed into oblivion.

It's an intense, fun, and patently simple game, but something happened a few weeks into playing it that changed my thoughts on exactly what's going on in this game, and the implications, frankly, were chilling. It all started when I had to pause the game to attend to something my four-year-old was doing. I had just gotten to a place in the game where the bridge falls away entirely, and my character had to jump on a rope and zipline down to where the bridge picked up again. This is the only time when you change perspective, because the "camera" briefly swings below the character as they slide down the rope.

My pause came just as the angle was changing, and when it stopped I was surprised to see some strange artifacts on the screen. Near the top, I could see four downward pointing arrows, gray and stony-looking, and near the bottom of the screen was a reddish, snaky looking thing that had a small fork at the end. It took me maybe ten seconds to realize what I was looking at... and my blood ran cold.

I was looking out from the inside of the monkey demon's mouth. I had just happened to pause as the swinging "camera" was poised between his upper teeth and tongue. Then I thought about it a little more... I had been doing well. I hadn't stumbled at all during the game so far. I hadn't even seen the monkey demon since the brief prelude to my run where I saw it racing out of the temple to follow me.

So here's how it breaks down, folks. The people who programmed this game could have just set it up so the back of the monkey demon appears when you make that first stumble. But they didn't do that. They set it up so that the monkey demon *is* *always* *there*, *whether* *you* *see* *it* *or* *not*. It is not even onscreen, but it's always invisibly snapping at your heels, ready to leap forward into view the moment you screw up. And even worse, they took the time to give it huge, sharp teeth and a forked tongue, *even* *though* *you* *never* *see* *the* *damned* *thing* *from* *the* *front*, except in that initial glimpse.

That's the moment that it stopped being a game for me. I'm not saying I stopped playing it, but the way I played it changed. It became more of a personal mission to do better, run faster, to stay even farther ahead of that dark, loping thing, even though I now know I can't run fast or far enough to keep it more than two steps behind me. Sometimes it feels like it's the most apt metaphor for life I can think of.

What Raiders Taught Me

A few months ago I wrote a blog called "The Collected Works", in which I mused about the size of the body of work I've written over the course of my lifetime. I knew at the time I wrote it that I had, in my basement, several filing cabinets and boxes in which I had many handwritten projects that never saw the light of day, either because they were unfinished, or had been written in my childhood and were ridiculous. But what I decided to do after I wrote that piece was to go through and digitize whatever I could still decipher of my chicken scratchings (winner of the 1989 Rosetta Stone award for questionable handwriting in my senior year of high school, thank you very much), just so I could have some record of it existing in the first place, for good or ill.

What I found as I started to go through and collate the contents of those file drawers was startling. I found several aborted short pieces, and a full screenplay, that were excessively violent and at times just mean-spirited. My style suddenly swung from swordplay and Dungeons & Dragons-variety derring-do to spies, devil worshipers, and more deadly gunplay than any Sam Peckinpah film. It seems that I was always eager to set up simple kill-or-be-killed conflicts, mostly with one person against incredible odds, and require them to slug or blast their way out, with no quarter given.

I'm still in the process of going through all these old stories, but early in the process I started to see a pattern developing, a clear tipping point when my work turned more violent and turned into a series of action set-pieces. It became clear during my attempts to place these writings on a timeline; the most reliable method turned out to be following my progress through my preferred writing process: from longhand block writing to cursive, back to print, then to manual typewriter, followed by electric typewriter. Adding in any recollections I have of where my family lived when I originally wrote them, I found I could usually place a piece somewhere within a year of when it was written. And that sea change came somewhere around 1981, when I was nine years old. So what caused it?

A little background: growing up, I was in what most people would term a "progressive" household. At the dawn of the Seventies, I had a mother who worked, a father who changed diapers, and a strict no-gun toy policy. All of these things, I probably don't need to point out, were turnarounds from the way houses had been run in the Fifties and Sixties. Not that my parents were hippies in any sense of the word, but they took the lessons of that decade to heart and raised my brother and me in a kid-friendly, stable household, with emotional support and a sense of safety.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve realized that my early works fall into two clear camps: pre-Raiders of the Lost Ark and post-Raiders of the Lost Ark. That film, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's homage to old-time movie serials, was Harrison Ford’s first turn as archaeological explorer Indiana Jones, and came out over thirty years ago, right at the beginning of summer 1981. I remember that I saw it twice in the theater that summer, accompanied by my Dad, who fell asleep midway through both times.

Up until that summer, the most action I had experienced on screen was three years before, when I saw Star Wars for the first time (I didn't catch it until the 1978 summer re-release, so there's no need to call the sci-fi math police, folks). Raiders was a different kind of animal, though. Seeing an alpha male blow his problems away with a pistol that sounded like a cannon, while repeatedly saving a woman who was simultaneously helpless and able to drink a giant Sherpa under the table, must have been more of a revelation to me than Star Wars.

I have to say, this shocks me more than a little bit. And it's taken me all this time to realize how that movie had held such a strong hold on my childhood psyche. I’ve rewatched the film a few times in the last decade, and every time I watch it as an adult, it kind of washes over me without having any effect. I know all the individual shots, I know so perfectly how it's going to go that there's no excitement or suspense. I took this for granted until now, thinking that it was just one of those movies that was so overplayed on HBO back in the day that I just sort of absorbed it. But maybe the fact that it’s been so long since the film had any emotional impact on me is evidence that it’s part of my DNA now.

This recent evidence has now proven that I was hypnotized by this movie specifically, and action movies in general, so much so that it stuck me in a creative rut for the next five years. Looking at my creative output during that time, it’s astonishing how clear my M.O. became: Take someone with no experience or background, and throw them into a life-threatening situation where they have to use violence to escape.

Of course, once I figured this out, I had to go further and figure out exactly why I gravitated toward those kind of stories. Here's the best I can come up with, and it matches up with something else I know about myself. It goes back to the choices my parents made bringing me up. Like I said, there was a no-gun policy in our house, toy or otherwise. And while I don't argue that my parents should have been more active in teaching my brother and me about violence, I think that might be the reason.

My parents were always clear with us that violence was not the answer to problems, and while they let us watch pretty much any TV shows we were interested in, they didn't let us watch old Popeye cartoons for that very reason. Growing up in that environment, I didn't end up having a real frame of reference for the consequences of violence. So when Raiders of the Lost Ark exposed me to it on a level I had never seen before, I don't think I knew how to process it correctly. It's strange; in being somewhat sheltered from violence, I also took a while to really learn the value of life. The pendulum ended up swinging the other way in my later childhood and early adolescence, when I began almost hyper-aware of onscreen violence, and even the dispatching of the most despicable/expendable evildoer would cause me to sympathize with their untimely end.

For a while I actively stayed away from violent material, but eventually the balance righted itself. And don't think that I'm calling out Spielberg and Lucas for making Raiders -- it's solid entertainment and delivers exactly what they set out to accomplish. I just wish I hadn’t taken it so much to heart, and thought it was the only way to tell a story. Still, if it hadn't been that film, another would have taught me the real price of violence, even if it did take me some time to work out. I suppose there are all sorts of issues that people just have to work out in their own time, and this is one that I'm still unearthing from my past.

Shining Inconsistencies

Being such a big Stephen King fan, you'd probably be surprised to know that The Shining was one of his books that I never got around to reading until recently (I still haven’t gotten to The Dead Zone yet either). While I knew Stanley Kubrick’s movie version was quite different from the book, I was surprised about how *really* different it turned out to be. And I can understand why... virtually all the conflict in the book is inside the character's heads. You get an even-handed view of what's going on from the vantage points of all four of the main characters, and there's virtually no way to translate that to the screen. I get what Kubrick was doing… he had to make someone the “bad guy”, because in the book it’s really the hotel itself and how it messes with people’s heads.

But what really bugged me most about it was this... remember that episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and has to keep it in the freezer because it's so scary? Well, when he discusses it with the other characters, most of the things he talks about are references to the movie, not the book! For example:

- "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is a phrase that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson’s character) types obsessively in the movie... in the book Jack actually finishes a play, although he doesn't like the way it turns out.

- Joey mentions the two creepy girls/ghosts in the hallway... in the book, although it's mentioned that two little girls were previously killed in the hotel, they never actually show up.

- Joey also ineptly tries to keep his discussion spoiler-free and mentions when the father goes after the mother and kid with a "blank" but they get away at the last minute... he could mean "axe" like in the movie, or "oversize croquet mallet" like in the book, but what he doesn't mention is the big explosion that happens at the end of the book... the movie ending is much more low-key.

- He does get the dead woman in room 217 correct, but that's one of the few things that's in both the book and the movie. (Except that in the movie, the room number was changed to 237 because the hotel in which the movie was filmed actually had a room 217 and they didn’t want customers to freak out about that.)

I guess I’m just surprised about how the TV writers who created the episode managed to choose the movie version over the book for *every* plot specific detail that they mentioned. If it was just an oversight, it was a stunningly consistent one.

Okay, nerd rant over. You may all resume your lives.

I Wanna Hold Your Five-Digit Cybernetic Appendage

I recently went through a phase where I read a lot of speculative non-fiction about the future of humanity, where things will progress in the next hundred years or so. It started with Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. It turns out that this Kurzweil guy is one of the most prominent thinkers about the future of humanity, and although he wrote the book back in 1999, he made bold predictions about what would happen in the next few decades.

It was interesting to read… some of the things that Kurzweil predicted would be happening today were way off (convenient and cheap virtual reality? Microcomputers embedded in our clothing? Nope, not yet.), he did have some things right. Mostly that computers would become more and more something that we would come to grow dependent on and be unable to function without. And he also put forth an interesting idea… it’s a well-known concept that the rate of computer processing is doubling every year and a half (it’s actually called Moore’s Law). But he says that this pace can only be sustained if we *become* computers ourselves. It will start with implants for our bodies (which we’ve already started doing), then augmentations to our brains (imagine a chip that will help you learn languages, or master the math you were never able to understand!), and soon the difference between a person and a computer will be completely negligible.

That makes sense to me… although I found myself asking if a machine that thinks and acts like a person really is a conscious entity. But Kurzweil had an answer for that, and basically it’s this… it doesn’t matter. For example, how do you know that the people around you are conscious entities, real thinking people? Well, it’s because they act like they are. And since the only subjective reality we can know is our own, there’s really no point to asking whether a human-like computer is really a living being. By all definitions we have, it’s just as much alive as we are.

Something else that I’ve been hearing about it is how we’re approaching the point when a computer can do more than a human mind. It’s called “the singularity”, and the prevailing thought it that if we don’t make sure that a computer learns to be human – to have compassion, and to want to preserve human life – then the kind of thing that happens in the Terminator and Matrix movies not only could happen, but probably *will* happen. The computers will see us as irrelevant at best, or at worst, a threat. There’s actually a big consortium of important people in the computer industry who are actively working to figure out how we can stop this from happening.

It seems to be the most logical way to teach a computer all the things that make us human is to actually merge humans and computers.. This process has already begun, and it’s a trend called “post-humanism”… people today already have powers and abilities well beyond our actual physical human capacity. We’re able to communicate with almost anyone we want to at a moment’s notice, no matter how far apart we are… we can move in the physical world at speeds of up to 600 miles an hour (17,000 if you count those folks in orbit). We can store and call up facts and memories by flicking our fingers across a screen. Each one of us is already much more than a human ever has been, and it’s all because of our use of computers as tools.

When I first heard about what the future of humanity was shaping up to be, I found it completely depressing. This idea of losing ourselves as organic beings and becoming mechanical seemed bleak to me. But the more I think about it, it really sounds like this is the next step in evolution. We’re not turning humans into machines, we’re turning machines into *us*. From that standpoint, it’s actually more depressing to think that we now sit in chairs eight hours a day tapping keys, and then go home and do the same thing for recreation. In a hundred years it will seem entirely primitive. Computers won’t be something we do, it will be who we are!

Can you imagine a world where we aren’t shackled by having to have some kind of mechanical interface to be connected to the world? We will be part of that network, any time we want to be, just by thinking about it. Of course, that brings up another question: What will we do with our physical selves when our access to work and recreation on the Internet is freely available at any time?

Dreadful Tunes

I'm willing to bet that this happens to everyone... there are songs out there that, even though they're not supposed to, instill in you a strange feeling that is the exact opposite of what the song is supposed to convey, or at least one that probably isn't what was intended. It might have something to do with the circumstances of how you first heard it, or maybe it taps into something in your psyche in just the wrong way, but you can never hear it the way you know you should. For me, there are a small bunch of these songs, but I've waited until now to discuss them because I've never been quite able to articulate what it is about them. Now, I have three songs that I'm at least somewhat confident I can discuss what it is about them that, well -- not necessarily bothers me, but gives them a weirdly specific emotional resonance. Here we go...

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"Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles (1981) - This, tellingly, was the first song played when MTV kicked off, and I’ll be damned if it wasn't prophetic. Music videos quickly became the propelling force behind the entire music industry for the next twenty years, and celebrity image became inextricably entwined with musical talent forevermore. This song always reminds me of all those artists who weren't photogenic enough to make the transition to video -- people like Peter Frampton, Steve Miller, and Christopher Cross come to mind.

The song itself, written and performed by future uberproducer Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes (who would later be a part of my favorite 80s supergroup, Asia), delivers the exact message that the title implies. It's a message to an aging radio star about how different music is now, how the "golden age of wireless" is never coming back, and how the world will be poorer for it. You get lines like this, delivered by Horn in a tinny, lo-fi buzz:

"Now we meet in an abandoned studio"
"Pictures came and broke your heart"
"We can't rewind, we've gone too far"

The whole thing smacks of irrevocable loss, which I'm coming to realize is a real emotional hot button for me. To top it all off, there's the chorus, which is the title phrase delivered over and over by a pair of women's voices, which somehow manage to sound cutesy-poo and robotic at the same time. It's the musical underlining of the song's point: from here on out, folks, surface is all that’s going to matter.

Maybe the fact that MTV predicted its own effect on music is what really makes this song seem deeper than it really is. After all, within ten years, acts like Milli Vanilli and C+C Music Factory would try to prove that it didn't matter if the person in the video was the one who really sang the words (thankfully, we didn't entirely fall for the trick). But the music did become more a part of a package, instead of being the package itself. I'm not saying that music before was less about the celebrity of the musician than the music itself, but substance got pushed even farther to the side. Rock ‘n’ roll became less of a revolution than a movie about a revolution.

Then again, when this song comes on I can't help but wait for the stinger at the end, and it's the only part of the song that isn't delivered in a clipped staccato: it's a woman's voice, distant and echoey, that comes in and repeatedly intones "You are a radio star". It sounds like an afterthought, but I can't help but think that she uses the word "you" for a particular reason. Maybe we're all in the process of becoming obsolete.

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"Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors (1986) - I know, this song is supposed to be hopeful, or at least humorous. The character who sings it, an urban naïf named Audrey, is dreaming of a life away from the squalor of where she currently lives – an unnamed city’s Skid Row in the 1950s. Her dream is simple... what she wants is a husband, two kids, nice appliances, a 12-inch television, and a lawn. That's it.

Now, taken in the context of the film, it's supposed to be fun and clever. This woman wants the most simple things, and dreams of them so rapturously. But to me, a fourteen-year-old at the time it came out, it seemed completely bleak and hopeless. It said to me, "Well, there it is. That's the best you can hope for in life, kid. Not much, is it?"

I probably thought this because I was exposed, at a particularly young age, to the songs of French songwriter Jacques Brel, who I guess can be called the Morrisey of the 60s. The collection of his songs, "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris", is one of those albums I actively dreaded as a kid for the same reason I hated "Somewhere That's Green"... it’s just too bleak and existentially brutal to be enjoyed on any level. Brel’s songs contain angstfests like "Next", in which a man reminisces about losing his virginity in a dehumanizing military brothel and contemplates suicide, or "The Old Ones", where an old couple waits to die in their increasingly small, silent home, or "Sons Of...", an even more depressing song about children growing up and leaving home than "Sunrise, Sunset"... I had all these memorized by the time I was ten.

So "Somewhere That's Green" hit all the same buttons for me. Mowing the lawn on Saturdays and watching TV in the evening? That's all life is, kid, and you'll be lucky if you even get that.

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"Don't Worry, Be Happy" - Bobby McFerrin (1988). I know this one is the most out of left field. I mean, it's right there in the freaking title. This song is supposed to be a happy one, maybe one to turn your day around when it's all going wrong. But I propose that it is anything but.

Again, I think my original feeling about it was because of the circumstances... the first time I heard it was at the tail end of the summer of 1988. I was away from home at camp for a week, and my girlfriend had just moved to Florida, so this might have influenced my state of mind at the time. The first time I heard the "ooh-ooh"ed chorus, I couldn't help but think that there was a different feeling lurking behind the just-smile sentimentality. I mean, it wasn't a carefree "la la" or its even more carefree cousin, the "na na". It was a string of "ooh"s that descends, and flips into A-minor before resolving. That's the part that got me. It's a vocalized version of a mournful whistle, the joy in which sounded to me like it was only halfhearted.

The verses aren't that much better... Bobby intones a list of bad things that may already be happening to you in a faux-Jamaican accent (if there was ever a shorthand for oppression, that's it!), from being loveless to homeless to being run through the legal system. The solution to all these ills? Be happy! That's it. Then we're back to that somewhat haunting "ooh-ooh" chorus again, each time with more harmonies laid across the top of it. In my opinion, it starts sounding quite desperate by the time the song ends.

One more thing that bugs me about the song... at several points Bobby flat-out states that you shouldn't make *everybody* *else* feel sad by acting that way yourself. Now, I'm all for the idea that changing your physical demeanor and outlook can't help but make you actually feel better, but do we really have to start worrying about how other people feel when they see us struggling? Not helping, Bobby.

As a postscript, let me state that I think Bobby McFerrin is a ridiculously talented musician and vocalist. If you haven't seen his Spontaneous Invention concert video, I suggest you do so immediately. Or at least do a Youtube search of his version of the Beatles' "Blackbird". I just don't think that "DWBH" is what America naively embraced it to be. It's a much more sly commentary than that. But then again, there are plenty of songs that the rah-rah American public took at face value in the 80s (Springsteen's acerbic-in-retrospect "Born in the USA" comes immediately to mind).

As I've said, I'm sure that all these songs are influenced by my state of mind when I first heard them, or what they came to represent afterward. But isn't all art, really? There's some absolute musical crap that I (and you too, I imagine) completely adore, and that love hinges entirely on factors that exist outside the music itself. It's something to consider, when you take a look at what you like and what you don't.

The Moon Illusion

For a long time, I was convinced that the Moon Illusion wasn’t true. No matter how many scientists discussed what it was and theories about why it might work, I just didn’t believe it. Maybe you've heard about this trick our eyes play on us... when you look at the moon low on the horizon, it appears to be huge, much larger than when it is seen up higher in the night sky. However, if you really take the time to analyze it (maybe by checking to see if there are any features that are clearer when the moon is nearer the horizon, or by holding up a penny at arm's length for size comparison between low and high moons), you'll find that there really is no difference in the apparent size of the moon, no matter where it is the sky. Sure, while it's on the horizon, the moon might be a little distorted and orangey, thanks to the larger amount of atmosphere you're looking through to see it, but for all intents and purposes, the moon appears no bigger on the horizon than it does when it's directly overhead.

Like I said, I used to be skeptical of this. My eyes told me that the moon had to be bigger when it was low in the sky, just had to. I could look and verify it on any clear night. There was no shaking me from that thought. Now, I have to admit, I realize that I was wrong. And what brought me to this conclusion was a simple thought experiment that taught me not to believe everything my eyes think they see.

Start off by thinking about how you judge the distance of objects, especially objects overhead. The ceiling above you right now, for example. If you're sitting down, the ceiling of an average room would be, say, about four feet over your head. As you look at the ceiling toward the corners of the room, the amount of space you have to look across goes up markedly. If you're at the end of a long hallway, the distance from your eyes to the upper corner of the ceiling at the far end is longer than the actual hallway itself, because you're looking across the space at a diagonal. This holds true even when you’re outside -- the distance of clouds near the horizon is clearly much farther than clouds that are directly over your head. So this is the framework your mind is constantly working in, in terms of perspective: directly overhead is closest, the horizon is very far, and the more you lower your gaze, your distance from objects at the same level goes up exponentially.

Now think about the moon. Your actual distance to the moon when it's on the horizon and when it's directly overhead differs by only about 4,000 miles (the radius of the earth -- sketch it out on a piece of paper and you'll see what I mean). Given that the moon is almost 250,000 miles away, that's not a lot of difference. So while in every other earthly situation, items an equal height off the ground will be hundreds of times farther from your eye depending on whether they're right over you or just above the horizon, when it comes to the moon there’s only a change of less than 2%.

And that's how your eye gets fooled. In this unique instance, you're looking at an object that barely changes distance from when it's overhead to when it's actually coming over the horizon. Your brain processes it in the same way it processes perspective to any other object, and the result is that it thinks the moon on the horizon has got to be much larger than when it's above. That’s the only way your mind can figure that it looks to be about the same size. This conflict between its apparent size and the brain's judgment of how far it must be given that it's close to the horizon is what causes the Moon Illusion.

I've heard many people talk about the Moon Illusion, how it's perplexed scientists for centuries, and I've also heard it explained in confusing ways like "because it's near the horizon, your mind processes it like a background object instead of a foreground object", but once I realized my own personal explanation for it, all my confusion just drained away. It made me realize what power there is in scientific acceptance, that beautiful moment when you realize that what you were so sure of five minutes ago is dead wrong, and that it’s okay.

I think a lot of what causes the problems the world has today is our inability to realize when we've been wrong, and to shift our beliefs accordingly. There are so many people holding onto antiquated ideas and dogmas, simply because it's what they're familiar with. I realize that it's scary to give up a belief system you've had for so long, even for so long that it's one you inherited from older generations you love and admire. But keep in mind that many truths we now know, at one time was thought to be either wrong or simply unknowable. Hold fast to what you believe, but not so tightly that you can't let go when it's time to.