Sweet synchrony

I really am extraordinarily lucky.

Following the breakup of my (all things considered) disaster of a first marriage, I had pretty much figured that was it for romantic entanglements.  Then in November of 1999, a mutual friend introduced me to a woman named Carol who loved travel, dogs, birdwatching, music, the outdoors, and red wine, saying that there was no way two people so similar shouldn't get together.  With some hesitation -- both due to my earlier decision to avoid dating, and a hefty dose of social awkwardness -- I asked her out.

It soon became obvious we were soulmates.  We'd only been dating for six weeks when I said, just making a joke, "I'm going to take a trip to Iceland -- want to come with me?"  I was fully expecting her to say, "Iceland?  Why the hell would anyone go to Iceland?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

Our courtship was, in many ways, a comedy of errors, appropriate enough in retrospect given the screwball comedy our life together has turned out to be.  Our second trip overseas, to Belize, was great fun -- till we (and everyone else in the camp where we were staying) simultaneously got food poisoning.  It only lasted twelve hours, but was absolutely the sickest I've ever felt.  I won't go into gruesome details, but I'll just say that after we recovered, Carol remarked that if two people can coexist in a small cabin while elbowing each other out of the way every fifteen minutes to make it to the bathroom in time, without one of them killing the other, it has to be a match made in heaven.

I agreed.  After two more years of wild adventures (and no repeats of the Belize incident, fortunately), in July of 2002, we decided to make that match permanent.

Kind of amazing how well I clean up, honestly.

Now, almost twenty years later, we've only discovered more and more ways we're similar.  I can't tell you the number of times one of us has said something completely random, and the other has looked shocked and said, "I was just about to say exactly the same thing."  We are alike in good ways and bad -- we've also frequently remarked about how our less-praiseworthy habits reinforce each other.  This is particularly obvious when it comes to tidiness.  We've been told that our décor style is called "shabby chic."  I don't know about the "chic" part, but we've got "shabby" locked up.  Our approach to housekeeping can best be described as "There appears to have been a struggle."

But along the way we've had a huge amount of fun, even if finding out visitors are coming induces a panicked frenzy of vacuuming, mopping, sweeping away cobwebs, and putting away piles of books, art work, pottery, dog toys, and weird assorted souvenirs from various trips that have been strewn about for months.  But you can only do so much.  Even afterward, our house looks like a poorly-maintained museum.

On a trip to Canada a couple of years ago, while visiting an antique store.  The cobbler's bench in front of us is now our coffee table.

The adventures have never stopped.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Mevagissey, Cornwall, England

I still periodically find it baffling that she puts up with my rather squirrelly personality, navigating my yo-yoing moods with apparent aplomb.  All I know is what I started out with: I am damn lucky.

And I found out just day before yesterday that our rapport forecasts a long and happy future.  According to a study of 154 couples published last week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, couples who have the kind of spark Carol and I have tend to gain both in satisfaction and longevity.

"Couples in the study varied greatly in... measures of positivity resonance, with some couples showing dozens of moments of emotional and physiological synchrony and others showing few or none," said psychologist Robert Levenson, of the University of California - Berkeley, who co-authored the study.  "We focused on those fleeting moments when you light up together and experience sudden joy, closeness and intimacy.  What we found is that having these brief shared moments, known as ‘positivity resonance,’ is a powerful predictor of how healthy we’re going to be in the future and how long we’ll live."

Which is cheering.  Even more fascinating is that that resonance goes all the way down to the physiological level -- couples who scored high on the assessment not only synchronized such obvious social cues as smiling and laughing, their heartbeats and breathing synchronized, as did their blood levels of such powerful (positive) mood regulators as serotonin and oxytocin.

So this all bodes well for Carol and me.  That said, I have to say that there are ways we're not alike; for example, our approach to shopping.

Carol will comparison-shop for paper towels.  I, on the other hand, am so impulsive I'm flat-out dangerous to have by your side when there's a big purchase.  Part of it is that I loathe shopping so much that I'll do damn near anything, including paying twice as much as I should, just to get it over with.  I really related to the anecdote that humor writer Dave Barry tells, when he and his wife were looking for a house to buy:

Dave Barry:  This is just perfect!  I love it!  I think this is ideal, don't you, dear?

His wife:  We're still in the real estate office.

In any case, the similarities vastly outweigh the differences, and even our unfortunate shared tendencies, not to mention our differences, are ameliorated by the fact that we're both pretty accepting of each other's foibles.  So the Levenson et al. study is really immensely cheering.  I'm looking forward to many more years together, traveling, playing with dogs, drinking wine, and navigating our way through the chaos of our shabby chic lives.

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Arr, matey

Yesterday, we had an elderly gentleman in Spain who is building a spaceship to go to a planet that doesn't exist, and he should have known it doesn't exist because he's the one who made it up.  Today, we have: a woman in Ireland who married the ghost of a pirate, but now she's unhappy with him and wants a divorce.

The woman's name is Amanda Teague, and she lives in Drogheda, County Louth.  Teague gave up on romance -- at least the flesh-and-blood kind -- last year, and decided she might have better luck in the spirit world.  So she fell in love with the ghost of a Haitian pirate who was executed three hundred years ago, and married him this past January.

The pirate's name was Jack Sparrow.  Because of course it was.

"It is the perfect kind of relationship for me," Teague told reporters.  "There are a lot of people out there who don’t know about spiritual relationships, but it could be right for them --  I want to get the message out there."

In 2018 she wrote a book about her experience being married to a ghost.  It's called A Life You Will Remember, and is available on Amazon, where it has gotten two reviews, one five-star and one one-star.  The one-star one called it "bad fanfiction you can't put down."

She didn't just jump into the relationship without careful consideration.  "I told him I wasn’t really cool with having casual sex with a spirit and I wanted us to make a proper commitment to each other," she told reporters.  "I wanted the big traditional wedding with the white dress. It was very important to me."

So that's what they did.

The happy, um, couple

But less that a year later, the marriage was on the rocks.  The relationship wasn't successful, Teague-Sparrow says, and she wants to get a divorce.  "So I feel it’s time to let everyone know that my marriage is over," she said, in an interview in the Irish Post.  "I will explain all in due course but for now all I want to say is be VERY careful when dabbling in spirituality, it’s not something to mess with."

The article in the Irish Post seems to take Jack's side of things.  "The split is another blow for Jack," writes Gerard Donaghy, "after he was purportedly executed for thieving on the high seas in the 1700s."

You'd think he'd be over that by now, given that it happened three-hundred-odd years ago, although I'd expect being hanged is a trauma that would kind of stick with you.

What is unclear is how she'll get him to sign the divorce papers.  Or maybe they won't have to go through the official hassle, because the wedding was performed by a shaman in a boat off the coast of Ireland, so it's not certain what, if anything, Irish law would have to say about it.  Chances are they could go their separate ways and no one would blink an eye, since nobody seems to be able to see Jack except for Teague-Sparrow herself.

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end for today.  I wish her luck with being single again, and I hope Jack can find a nice location to haunt, perhaps accompanied by a lady ghost, since a relationship with a live human didn't work out so well.  So thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link.  I didn't really need anything to lower my opinion of the human race further, but I know you meant well.

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

Confirmation bias, and the story of Jesus' wife

In well-done science, conclusions are based on one thing and one thing alone: the quality of the evidence.  When physicists announced a few months ago that they had data that seemed to support the conclusion that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light, every high-energy physicist  in the world began to sift through the evidence, looking for flaws, looking for inaccuracies, trying to see if the data supported such an earthshattering outcome.  And after rigorous analysis, the result did not stand -- Einstein's fundamental speed limit on the universe seems to have been vindicated once again.

Contrast that to how conclusions are drawn in other realms, where vanishingly small pieces of evidence are considered enough to support any conclusion you happen to favor.

This whole thing comes up because of the recent announcement that a small fragment of papyrus, covered with faded Coptic script, seems to indicate that Jesus might have been married.  [Source]  The finding, which has been analyzed extensively by historian and ancient language scholar Karen King, is the subject of a paper that was presented Tuesday in Rome at an international meeting of Coptic scholars.

Of course, the first question asked was, "Is the artifact a fake?"  And the conclusion was: probably not.  The script was examined by experts, and looks authentic.  The phrasing of the text seems consistent with other early writings in that language.  While the piece is too small to carbon-date, there is apparently some talk of a non-destructive spectroscopy on the ink that could give a rough estimate of its age.  One phrase begins, "And Jesus said, 'My wife...'" and then is cut off.  A later phrase on the piece says, "... she should be my disciple."

So: what we have here is a small fragment of paper, of unknown age, with two incomplete (but admittedly provocative) phrases.  And that was all it took.

Already we have people who are against the Catholic policy of celibacy for the clergy saying that this should change church law.  If Jesus was married, why shouldn't priests be able to?  Folks who want women to be priests jumped on the second phrase; the lack of a clear mention of female disciples in the bible is the only justification for church policy on the issue, they say, and this fragment clearly supports the ordination of women.

Then the woo-woos got involved.  Fans of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Martin Scorsese's controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which claimed that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, are saying that the fragment supports that contention.  Many of these people seem not to realize that the book and the film both reside in the "fiction" aisle.

Even wilder stories have started up.  Take a look at this article, that claims that the piece of papyrus is a clear vindication of the wacky ideas from Laurence Gardner's The Bloodline of the Holy Grail, in which Jesus survived the crucifixion, lived another hundred years in which he traveled to Tibet, and his wife and children ended up in France where they founded the Merovingian dynasty and ultimately ended up on the throne of Scotland. 

And to all of the above, I can only say: will you people please just chill?

There's a name for taking a tiny, questionable piece of evidence, and pretending that it trumpets support for an idea that you already agreed with; it's called confirmation bias, and unfortunately for the proponents of married priests, female priests, and Jesus being the ancestor of the Kings of Scotland, it's a logical fallacy.  Meaning that thinkers who are being honest should not engage in it.  The evidence we have is flimsy at best; Karen King, who is clearly a scholar of some repute, isn't even willing to hazard a firm opinion about the piece's provenance, but has given a guess that it probably dates from the Fourth Century.  So even if it is authentic, the thing was written three hundred plus years after Jesus died.  At that point, anyone could have written anything, and it wouldn't necessarily have any bearing on the truth of the matter.  The piece of paper could state that Jesus had blond hair and was left-handed and liked to eat donuts for breakfast, and there's no reason to conclude that those statements have any relevance to what the real man was like, since it was written long after anyone who actually knew him had died.

But, of course, unlike in science, that's not how these things work.  The married-priest cadre will certainly be harping on this finding for a while, as will the female-priest cadre.  The Dan Brown Writes Non-Fiction Society is probably also going to continue making little excited squeaking noises about all this, and any woo-woos further out on the plausibility scale will have a field day drawing conclusions from what in any other field would hardly constitute any evidence at all.

As I've observed before: confirmation bias is these people's stock in trade.  So honestly, I shouldn't be surprised.  But I still am, somehow.