Changing Our Minds

Since the Minds were pried open last April, the look and feel has been the same (minus a 20 minute change once upon a time...which was a flop...and also had removed some fun Easter Eggs, thanks Jewish Gal for noticing that one).

But after a month of posting daily, the Minds are heading into surgery.

Over the weekend (and hopefully done by then) the look of the blog will change slightly.

Plans include getting rid of the dark undertones (AKA: The background), and contributing writers (The Cautious Couple will hopefully find their own way, and The Shomer Toucher, has long since left the blog-o-sphere), and hopefully turning this blog into a great focal point for conversation and thoughts.

Thanks to the 17,000 views before now, and for the next 17,000 views as well.

Have in mind this weekend Wondering Minds b. Tziporah Bloggah, and see y'all on the flip side!

Healer, Heal Thyself

I'm lucky enough to have a very educated circle of friends, many of whom are practicing or pursuing specialized careers in providing for the well being of others.


Psychology seems to be an all-around favorite profession. For some reason it makes me proud to watch my friends and contemporaries become mental health counselors, social workers, psychologists and school psychologists. I imagine these curricula to be vast and hopefully taxing on the undertakers' critical reasoning skills.


Sometimes the reaction to all this material is to become alarmist and recognize yourself in the disorders, even though your tendencies are still within normal limits. Still at other times, you manage to completely miss the fact that you have intra/interpersonal issues that are quite obvious to even non-qualified people who know you. Or, you acknowledge your issues but fail to tackle them the same way that you would encourage your underlings to do.


It becomes unsettling to see said psychologist stamping their professional opinion on other people's behaviors when you experience firsthand how dysfunctionally they deal with you in a conflict. I know it's difficult to recognize your own faults, but your position becomes laughable to me if your techniques are not good enough to work on yourself. It makes me wonder why you went into the profession in the first place. Just like I doubt the abilities of the hairstylist whose hair is shapeless and highlights are in dire straits, I am doubting whether I would honestly feel confident in you managing my (theoretical) case or the case of anyone I care about. If you were anything but a hairstylist, your messy hair would go unnoticed, but in the role you chose that attribute is under scrutiny.


If you have a long-standing personality issue that needs to be fixed but cannot be changed easily, I suggest you stop procrastinating. Acknowledge, apologize, take responsibility for it and for heaven's sake get off your high horse. The accomplishments in your career do not cover up your personal shortcomings that your friends and family have to endure. It makes you look foolish.


It's instinctual to look for faults in those who put themselves out there as experts. As your friends, we know you are a normal person despite your intellectual authority, and we try not to hold you to a higher standard of mental integrity than a regular person. However when you fall below that bar even.... you fail. And some observations don't require your degree in order to be correct.

Script: A Lost Art?

I have a lovely little note sitting in the piles of randomness on my desk. I go through phases from hoarding to cathartic trashing, but this note never seems to make the cut for garbage. The content is sweet but not exceptionally memorable. Yet the reason it brings a smile to my face is for the perfectly shaped cursive that its writer sports so casually. It's from a simple, well-mannered 60-something year old administrator... and when I received her handwritten script note of recognition last year, I saw her as a ladylike beacon from a previous era.

As I struggled to write several Mother's Day cards using my best script handwriting, it bothered me that I lack this feminine grace that both of my grandmothers and my aunts possess.  Nowadays my script looks more like a leafy scratch, while they each have these gorgeous, loopy signatures/handwritings (degree of loopiness varies between them but the precision does not) that just flow effortlessly. From what I understand they were strictly disciplined in public school for their script handwriting back in the day- to the extent that my grandfather who is a lefty was taught to write with his right hand- and the habits that they were taught stay with them until today.

I happen to love my handwriting; it's like a skinny print with a slant and a curve that resembles script. I am not a fan of the large, girly, rounded print that a few of my colleagues still tote. Most people I know do not come out of college or graduate school with their cursive unscathed (unless they always take notes on laptops I guess), but the extent to which we have collectively lost the skill and our value for it really is remarkable. I can still remember the declaration at the beginning of the SAT that had to be written word-for-word in script, and a smart-aleck boy sitting in front of me made the whole class wait for him to etch his way through that one sentence, one painful letter at a time, because he couldn't write in script for his life.

Remember how cool calligraphy used to be? Who even thinks about it anymore when hundreds of fonts are at our fingertips? Likewise I suppose that handwriting is not as important to stress nowadays since official documents are all typed up and we are not relying on penmanship for legibility of contracts anymore.

Times have changed. I wish the signature on my driver's license was more swoopy, but I do not regret my rigorous education and notetaking that vanquished it. Hopefully once I start digitizing my signature for official reports that I sign off on, I will have perfected it a bit.

Just something to think about: conversations have been reduced to messages, messages have been reduced to texts, and texts have been reduced to symbols ("The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics" by Michael Maslansky). Similarly our beautiful penmanship system is slowly draining away as we replace it with more expedient orthography.

What do you think of your handwriting, script or print?

Under the Weight of a Name

Thank you, WM for the gracious invitation to become a contributing author to the Minds. I hope to indeed live up to the name I was bestowed and touch some of you with my thoughts, whether they happen to be sensuous or not.

In the cyberworld, one can choose a screen name to project any image they desire. Their name might truly reflect an ideal or identity of theirs, or it might be embellished with an attribute they wish they could claim. As all of us bloggers know, there's a thought process involved in forming a blog/ger name. There are so many options to control the biases through which our posts are received, and it can be a challenge to be fair to yourself in how you are framing your writing.

The debate of how well ones online persona predicts how they conduct themselves in real life fascinates me, but that discussion is for another time.

What is presently on my Mind are the names that we do not choose for ourselves. Having been exceptionally popular when I was younger, and less outwardly popular but more respected for intelligence as I matured, I thankfully was never the object of derogatory nicknames. But consistently though throughout grade school, I was taught that the prohibition of ona'as devarim (torturing someone through words) includes calling someone a nickname, particularly one that they do not like. I could recite the pasuk from which we extrapolate this prohibition for years. It always seemed like a nice way of being sensitive, perhaps going an extra mile to avoid something that isn't really that mean. But the depth and insight that went into forbidding this action under actual torture only became clear to me a few weeks ago.

I tend to Touch, but on occasion I wrongly take my audience's acceptance for granted and push the limit into saying something inconsiderate. A long time ago, in a half-attempt to flirt and half-attempt to tease with a particle of truth, I called a boy who had a crush on me by a nickname. It was not a mean name at all; it was just a nickname. There was nothing inherently flattering or derogatory to the name I chose, but he was very hurt and I did not understand why. I took it back and apologized to him... I had a theory of why it upset him so much, probably because it was supremely neutral and borderline immature, while he was rightfully hoping that I would view him with more of a sexual appeal. I could understand that, but never would have anticipated this train of thoughts in time to switch the nickname I had chosen to one that would not be offensive to him.

In a similar twist of events, a colleague that I had reason to believe respected me (if not more, but at least he is not religious so there is nothing up for discussion) recently publicly proclaimed me with a new nickname: Giggles. I had laughed a few seconds before that and tend to laugh more than my peers in order to make everyone less neurotic. I also tend to laugh incredulously at things my superiors do, or at inside jokes when a comment is way too arcane for anyone else to find funny but I can actually reference. But apparently he was perceiving all this as immature, girl-next-door who Giggles, and the playing field between us so low that saying it in public held no ramifications as far as his own shame. It really got to me, even though I know that the rest of my colleagues find me talented and valuable B"H.

Perhaps the name I was given is neutral, but when you hold yourself to a higher standard that you've earned, even neutral is derogatory. I wasn't able to explain all this to the colleague, but after ignoring him for a while (he missed my laughs!) I told him that giving me a nickname like that was flat out douchey. He claimed he didn't mean it and that I should know him better than to take him seriously. Of course he didn't mean it mean it, and I know he is in full-realization of my other good qualities besides for being easy going. But there is truth behind every joke, and when an all-encompassing nickname does not line up with how a person wants to be perceived, it is painful. It is painful to hear what first comes to mind when others think of you, and likewise there is no way to anticipate how your neutral nickname will resonate with another person. The Torah incorporates human psychology all-knowingly when it forbids us from doing just this. I finally understood and fully regretted what I did to that boy so long ago... and with that I swallowed my medicine.

~Shomer Toucher