Today I’m wondering how we know things. I can think of three ways: storytelling, sorting, and eeny-meeny-mynie-moe.
Yesterday I spent eight hours configuring Beret’s new computer. It was eenie-meenie-mynie-moe all the way. Try this. Then that. Then the other. Working through this probabilistic branching exercise — especially when you get into the “advanced options” tab of Outlook for Beret’s four different email addresses – was what took at least five of the eight hours. The other three were spent on a world tour of tech support worthy of the Travelocity gnome, repeating the same information to literally five different call-center operators in three different countries. Because I was configuring Beret’s computer and her emails, I used her name, which gave me an entirely new level of empathy for what it is like to have a non-standard moniker. To each new tech I spelled, and re-spelled, B-E-R-E-T. She’s always hated when people on the phone call her “Bert.” But I’m going to suggest that, when dealing with tech support, she should just go with it, or better yet, call herself “Fred.” After all, the guy who responded to my first live chat request was named (I shit you not) “Jester.” That was confidence inspiring. Anyway, the fifth guy led me patiently through the branching exercise for each address, and it finally, mercifully, it worked. But why? Eenie-meenie-mynie-moe.
Then there’s the Sort. You start with a pile of jellybeans, or jigsaw puzzle pieces, you decide which color they are, and you put them into different piles. Linnaeus was the quintessential sorter, and much of academia still works this way. Want a thesis topic? Argue the revolutionary concept that the jellybean previously thought of as aqua is actually a variant shade of teal. But understand in advance that the next generation of scholars will attack you as an idiot for not realizing that the viscous legume under scrutiny is more precisely described as the culturally-appropriate “azul” (and shame on you for having used the term “teal” in the first place, as it is a retrograde slur against ducks).
Of course, I am biased in favor of story. After you sort the jellybeans, you sequence them into a rainbow. Darwin took Linnaeus’ classification and turned it into the story of evolution. Biographers take the jumble of a life and shape it into a narrative. Medical researchers take the suffering of a disease and analyze it into a natural history, a treatment, and perhaps even a cure. Prophets take the brutal chaos of existence and proclaim it to be a path to salvation. Derided as “not data-driven,” “merely theoretical,” or worse, “speculative,” story is not how we most accurately know, because our methods of scientific inquiry tend to be stuck on “sort.” But story is how we most deeply believe.
Epilepsy appears to be taking me through these stages one by one. I’m six months into the eenie-meenie-mynie-moe of anti-convulsant meds. Eenie was rather a meany, and mynie worked for a while and now is not working so well, so we’re going to cross-titrate into mynie, with a dose of moe on hand just in case a seizure lasts too long. Thus having “failed” with eenie and meenie, I’m now entering the Sort phase. It turns out there are various types of epilepsy, from “compliant” (good dog!) to “refractory” (bad dog! Baad!) with a spectrum of “semi-compliant” and “partially refractory” in between (good dog with bad days, perhaps triggered by your uncle who, no matter how many times he comes over, just doesn’t have the right canine vibe).
I’m still waiting for the story to emerge. I Recently asked an IT geek why computers are still such a guessing-game. He smiled smugly and replied, “I guess they seem that way to the end user.” Yeah, right. I asked my neurologist last week, what — after hundreds of years of religious and scientific inquiry — is the story of epilepsy? She replied, more candidly than the IT guy, “We’re just too stupid to know.” Given this lack of narrative, I now realize I need to stop being such a frustrated end-user, and focus on being a happier dog.