Walk a mile in my over-muscled cramp-prone freakish physique

I don’t know anything about bodybuilding, or I didn’t until I watched Raising the Bar 2, a brand-new documentary by Mike Pulcinella (Mike wrote it, shot and edited it).  Mike often submits comments to this site, and we have corresponded by e-mail a number of times.  A couple weeks ago, Mike asked me whether I’d be interested in watching his new documentary, and I jumped at the chance.  Based upon Mike’s many comments to this site, I know him to be a thoughtful guy. I knew that he must’ve found something worthy of his time in this freakish-seeming endeavor of “bodybuilding.” 

In this documentary, Mike follows his brother Dave Pulcinella (and Dave’s significant other, Jenn Emig) as Dave trains for and competes in high-level bodybuilding competitions.  Before you jump to the conclusion that this is just some guy following his brother around with the camera, take a look at the trailer for “Raising the Bar 2,” available at Mike’s site. As you will see, Mike is a skilled filmmaker and storyteller and he is careful to make sure that this story retains real-life texture.  Mike’s edits are crisp and the soundtrack works well.  As for the storytelling, this kind of video could only have been accomplished by a filmmaker who had gained the complete trust of the participants.  In sum, this documentary is not always a glowing endorsement of Dave.

The documentary was compelling on several levels.  First of all, viewers will have an opportunity to see what is …

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Sterilize chronically abusive parents

We like to think of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as days when young children give lots of hugs to their loving parents.  We don’t like to consider that these days are also days when thousands of innocent children are beaten by their parents, their anguished cries often not heard outside of their dysfunctional homes.  Saddest of all, these children are condemned to be beaten and screamed at by the people they trust most. 

In 1988, I was waiting for an elevator at the State office building where I worked as an Assistant Attorney General. Many social workers had their offices in the same building, and several of those social workers were also waiting for an elevator.

All of a sudden, a middle-aged man started yelling at a three-year-old boy, who started crying.  The boy weighed about 40 pounds.  The man quickly got angrier and started smacking the boy violently with the palm of his hand-maybe it was his fist.  Whump! Whump! Whump!   The little boy was now breathless and whimpering.  Like the other half-dozen people waiting for an elevator, however, I did nothing but stand there horrified.  The man cocked his arm back to strike the boy yet again when one of the social workers jumped forward and yelled at the man: “Stop hitting that child!”

With that, the man looked confused, then angry, then more confused, then meek.  The social worker further instructed him: “follow me.” The man followed the social worker, presumably to the social worker’s office.  …

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The shocking same-ness of human behavior

As a general rule, simple questions, especially simple questions with purportedly obvious answers, are the most interesting questions.

While I attended a wedding this weekend, I noticed all of the sex partners seated together, you know . . . husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends (and a few gay couples).

Why do sex partners sit together at public rituals, I wondered.   The obvious answer is that it’s because most sex partners live together, right?  Other people thus see sex partners as couples and feel that they should be invited to important rituals together, especially to important rites of passage, such as weddings.  But why do so many sex partners live together (and hence get invited to prominent social events as couplets)?  After all, instead of living with her sex partner, maybe a woman would rather live with (and then potentially be invited to go to weddings with) a non-sex partner friend or neighbor, or perhaps even her non-sex-partner plumber or accountant.  Or maybe she’d rather attend public gatherings by herself, so that she could freely mingle.  The norm, however, is obvious to anyone who bothers to scan the crowd at a wedding:  the great majority of people who attend such gatherings attend them as sexually-paired couples.

Someone who followed the SSSM model might say that this behavior (of attending prominent rituals with your spouse) is simply learned, or that it is “social convention” or that it “feels right.”   There is a compelling story that can be told about paternity …

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If you want me to appreciate my ancestors, it’s going to take some time.

My wife and I attended the wedding of a good friend today.  A thoughtful and sometimes light-hearted rabbi presided over the ceremony. 

This ceremony was quite a change of pace from most of the religious weddings I’ve attended.  There was no somber talk about the heavy guilt we bear for being human or how small and pathetically helpless we are, or how we are at the mercy of a God who could crush us for no reason if He wanted.  Instead, the ceremony focused on the interrelationships of the people attending the ceremony.  We were all there to celebrate and support the new marriage as a newly bonded community.  I was really getting into the ceremony, which is unusual for me (I generally prefer empty churches).

Toward the end of the ceremony, the rabbi invited each of us to take a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors, to consider all those things our ancestors had done to enable each of us to be standing there today.  Like most people, I started considering the sacrifices made by my parents and grandparents, but that got me thinking about the overwhelming odds that I shouldn’t actually exist at all. 

I shouldn’t exist?  Why would I think that?  Because if my mother had not met my father at the right point in time, and if they had not been amorous at the right time of the right day, the sperm and the egg that became “me” would never have met …

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A trip to the neighborhood psychic store

Last Saturday, I was running some errands with my daughters when we passed by a store called “Mystic Valley.”  I mentioned to my daughters (they are six and eight) that some people believe that they can tell the future and read other peoples minds.  My daughters were incredulous.  They thought I was being silly, so they made me “pinky swear” that I was telling the truth.  I pinky swore before making a U-turn to head back to the neighborhood psychic store.

“Come on,” I said.  “Let’s go into the store and check out the people who believe that other people can tell the future and read their minds.”  My daughters were still suspicious that I was making this up, but into the store we went.

The first thing you notice is the smell of incense.  We passed by the rack of psychic magazines, then the shelves of crystals, the piles of drums, and some ethnic carvings before noticing that there were about seven small tables scattered throughout the store, each of them with two people seated facing each other.  Many of the experts were holding the customers’ hands.  If you listened closely, you could hear the psychics counseling the customers.

“Now do you believe me?” I whispered to my daughters.  They didn’t know what to think.

I walked up to the checkout counter and asked the pleasant soft-spoken man what was going on at the tables.  He indicated that some of the people were psychics, others were doing tarot card …

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