Case 89

I recently had a true "duh" moment (not unlike the one I had a few months ago). Did you know that if you're using a book that has a bunch of case histories chopped up and strewn over ten chapters, there's this amazing technique called "taking notes" that can allow you to reassemble these histories? I must admit, I prefer to see them all chopped up. I guess it's an aesthetic thing; like, a sculpture is more interesting to me than a hunk of marble, and part of the pleasure of a study in psychology or social work is to see how the author chops up and arranges the traces of the human beings who form her data.

But hey, you don't have to do it that way all the time! The other day I was reading a book called Varieties of Adolescent Experience (1926), by E. Leigh Mudge. (Could you ask for a better name if you were a psychiatric social worker? No, you could not.) I had great hopes that it would resemble William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, a beloved of my adviser's, if not mine, but it would give me something to talk about with him. In any case, E. Leigh's method was to give a survey to 100 female college students and have them write their life history. So these are examples of relatively rare case studies from the 1920s that use first-person narratives.

I'm not sure why, but I thought, gee, maybe I should write down the cases that seem like tomboys and keep track of them throughout the book. And holy mackerel, I'm glad I did. I've pieced together one so far: Case 89. I'll let her speak for herself.

I was always tomboyish; I am yet at times.... Before I entered my teens, I loved to take part in the wildly exciting boy-amusements. Indian games gave my childish soul thrills of delight, even though at night I did dream of horrible redskins who were lying in the corners of our haymow to grab me. I even flew kites and performed marvelous "stunts" on the trapeze in the vacant lot back of our barn.

One day, however, I discovered that I did n't want to play with "horrid little boys" who were interested in guns and dogs and Indians and dirt.... But I was restless and uneasy if I tried to be still. I did n't know why—but some funny feeling inside of me just would n't let me keep quiet. So...I played fairies—not quiet, beautiful, passive fairies, but more in the category of imps. For hours at a time two "dearest girls in the world" and I floated gracefully around the yard to the strains of weirdly enchanting music.

My thirteenth year saw a peculiar individual.... I was filled with the idea that I wanted to be a deaconess. I suppose this came as a result of the visit of Miss Susie ----. I admired her so much that I felt hers to be the very highest calling in the world.... Not content to wait until I was old enough, I persuaded my two boon companions to play deaconess.

I felt that I was called to help make humanity happy, and for a time I exulted in lecturing big, loppy trees who were drunkards with big families to support, and in comforting brown-eyed susans, who were frail wives, spending their lives in sweat-shops or over the wash-tub, and the dirty little children whom I could please with just a smile or a word.

Tomboy I was for a time, then religious, moody, violently happy. Through it all, however, my mother moved as the great, true heart who believed in me. To her I told everything. To her I went to cry in her arms when petty griefs arose.... I believe that it is to this chum, Mother o' Mine, that I owe all the comfort and content that I got out of that trying period; and when to others I appeared uncivil, grouchy, or hysterically happy, to her I was only a little girl who was growing up.

The Newsprint Closet?

Last month I got taken to task for being tempted to interpret some of my subjects as "gay." Well, I'm tempted again. Do you see the sketch above? Can you read the caption? This ran in the New York Times in June 1927.

I have a friend who has a theory about the Times. It goes like this: the New York Times editors are not liberal, but the photo editors are. How else to explain the rather frequently encountered photos of Cheney snarling, Rumsfeld looking diabolical, and Bush looking clueless? (He had this theory in the early days of the Iraq War.)

There's another theory out there, from a guy named Vito Russo, author of the great book The Celluoid Closet. Russo argued that homo Hollywoodians managed to sneak the gay into mainstream films via effeminate and butch characters, cross-dressing scenes, throwaway jokes, and so forth. It's pretty convincing—see the awesome documentary (some clips here) based on the book, which has all the footage that Russo talks about.

Combining the two theories, I'm thinking it might be possible that the Times had photo editors/illustrators who were "that way" in the 1920s. Seriously, I'm not looking for this stuff. It just has a way of finding me.

When You're a Jet, You're a Jet All the Way

This is the cockpit of the Airbus A320. It is the jet I flew on from PDX to MSP. And guess what, I happened to be sitting next to a flight attendant! She was mostly concerned with chatting with her fellow flight attendants, but for the last half hour or so she talked to me and the guy next to me about flying, jets, airports, and turbulence. Guys, I got the poop! Here are some interesting facts.

• Flight attendants aren't assigned to specific routes. They look at flight plans themselves, consider things like which planes fly on those routes, and then bid on the routes they want. I'm not too clear on what this involves, but it's way more complicated than I thought. The flight attendant I was talking to likes DC9s and 757s the best. She called the 757 the '57, so I did too. I complained about the hard landing (complete with bounce onto the runway) the last time I rode a 757. She gave me a blank look, and I realized it probably wasn't the plane, it was the pilot, or wind patterns, or something else.

• When the pilot lands one wheel at a time (back wheel, back wheel, front wheel), this is not a mistake. It is because of wind shear. The wind is blowing the plane from the side, and when you land a plane in wind shear, this is how you adapt your landing.

• Also not a mistake: the figure eight pattern around an airport. I said that I felt like the pilot had missed his exit off the freeway, especially when descending from low-lying clouds. No, this is a holding pattern. I told her about the time my Q400 (the turboprop) was about to land in Newark and we pulled up and flew around for twenty minutes. The pilot said it was to maintain even spacing between the planes. She said that she'd once been on a 747 (a massive plane) that was about to land in Detroit, only a DC9 was taking off on the same runway. If the 747 had landed, it would have caught the back of the DC9 as it took off. So the tower made them pull up. "They don't usually do that to a 747," she said. No doubt!

• The binging noises all mean something different, and they really bug flight attendants. "We're always getting binged," she said. "On the '57 the bings go bing, bing, but on these planes they go bing bing bing bing bing. I hate it!" She pointed to an exit sign. "In a few seconds you'll see the exit sign light up and hear another bing. That means we have about two minutes till we absolutely have to be in our jump seats. But I don't need the bing, I can tell by the way the plane's flying."

• The amount of turbulence on every flight varies, but you can count on it in some places. I noticed the flight attendant was turning green whenever we hit some bumps. Was this a bad sign? Shouldn't she be used to this? I asked her if she was OK, and she said, "Yes, I'm just pregnant." Oh! She leaned over to look out the window. "I'm just trying to see what approach we're taking," she said. "If we fly over the lake, we should be OK, but if we go over the valley, we're gonna get thumped. It looks like we're coming in over the lake." We talked some more about wind tunnels and the like, then we started turning. She looked out the window. The ground was visible below. "Oh, I shouldn't have looked," she said, and turned green again. "I wonder if we're coming in over the valley. Oh, looks like it. We're gonna get thumped. Sorry, guys."

For all the shaking, the landing was amazingly smooth. "Wow, nice landing!" she said. I agreed. I took out my boarding pass to see where my connecting flight would be. "Where are you going?" she asked. Newark. "Ugh, well, have fun." I am trying to take her words to heart my first morning back in Cheeseville. Trying.