Still stuck on the linear thing

Maybe again, if not still.

And by the linear thing, I mean the way my mom gets stuck on things (like why I mentioned Nina on the phone this morning, or who is David Eggers, etc.). It makes joke-telling futile, because she'll start asking questions that are irrelevant. I think I've expounded on this before, but here's what I mean:

A.: A man walked into a bar...
Mom: What man?
A.: It doesn't matter...
Mom: What bar?
A.: It doesn't matter.
Mom: Why did he walk in, then?
A.: I'm getting there.

It also makes watching movies very difficult, unless the movies are so absurd ("Zoolander," "Dude, Where's My Car?") that mom's attempts to establish order just add to the enjoyment of the film.

Anyway, I was reading the New Yorker--and this is off the topic, but here's some great civics-for-dummies from Hendrick Hertzberg:

"In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made in a fairly straightforward manner. There is an election, in which the voters, having paid attention to the issues for six weeks or so, choose a government. The governing party or coalition then enacts its program, and the voters get a chance to render a verdict on it the next time they go to the polls. Through one or another variation of this process, the people of every other wealthy democracy on earth have obtained for themselves some form of guaranteed health insurance or universal health care.

The way we do it is, shall we say, more exciting. For us, an election is only the opening broadside in a series of protracted political battles of heavy artillery and hand-to-hand fighting. A President may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legislatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legislatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interests can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures—which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat—an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down."

But I digress. However, before I get back to the subject at hand, I will direct you to this article, also from the New Yorker, about the "man cave" in the New York State Senate.

It was the article on Siberia, though, that brought me back to the linear issue. I thought, "I should send this to mom." Then I thought, "she'll just ask me why I sent it to her."

And then I thought about all the similar questions mom has asked me, and I wondered whether her questioning wasn't just an engineer's tendency to impose a certain logic on the world; I realized there was also a certain laziness to it.

Mom's flat-out admitted that in some ways she lets herself go when we're together (not so much in temper, because she does that when I'm not around, too, but in organization). When we travel together, she relies entirely on me to keep schedules straight. So why not extend that to thinking about books, movies, articles, etc.? It's like she can't be bothered to take that not-so-extra step that most of us take without a second thought, i.e. "hmm, this person sent me this article on things to do in Buenos Aires. Must be because she knows I'm going there next month. I'll skim it and take note of anything useful, and then delete it," she calls me and asks why I sent her said article. When watching a movie, instead of thinking, "huh, I wonder why that character did that; I guess I'll find out as the movie progresses," she just asks me why the character "did that," even when I have no insider information about said movie.

Or it could just be the engineer thing. I don't know.