Isn't that interesting...

While stewing here at my computer, accompanied by the cacophony of the concerto for double leaf-blower being executed just outside my office window, I came upon an article while perusing my daily New York Times headlines that they so graciously e-mail to me so that I am not totally cut off from the sturm and drang of the daily life others are so unfortunate as to enjoy. Scientists (those elite minds that propose a hypothesis and spend every waking moment trying to find the proof to support it) think they have found the underlying cause of emotional disorders in the genetic code. There is, they suppose, a battle that ensues between the mother and father genes. If the mother gene wins the war, the result is schizophrenia at the extreme end of the spectrum, whereas if the father dominates, autism results at the other end. Well, it makes sense, if you think about it. Females tend to be hysterical by nature (literally, wandering womb, you know, hysteria), whereas men are more emotionally dead. So the female gene causes hyperactivity of the emotions, and the male gene causes a flat emotional aspect. Do you think it could be that simple? Certainly, I have been acquainted with many men, including my father, who have the emotional life of a prawn. They live for logic, usually of their own construct, and happily inhabit that box all their lives. Women bamboozle them, with their need to be constantly questioning everything about their own existence, the existence of significant others, and not-so-significant others. Where is their logic? As I see it, men sit in the center of their own little insulated universe, and everything revolves around them in concentric orbits. The woman in their life bounces between orbits like those electrons in an atom do. Excite an atom, and the electrons leap about like crazy. Ditto, a man. Women, on the other hand, see themselves as just one part of an intricate web. Everything is connected to them, and if any of the souls they feel woven with is agitated, she is agitated as well, sort of like when one of my dog decides to get up and walk around in circles on the bed in the middle of the night - I am instantly awake, awaiting the next shock. We are such interesting creatures to begin with, and now we are finding that the whole race is divided sharply in mindset, as well. I think it is the moon's fault. Without it, the earth would wobble so drastically on its axis that there would be no stable climate zones that foster agriculture, and we would still be without a civilization, fashioning arrowheads and spears from wood and stone, and happily hunter-gathering in small nomadic tribes. Some days, that sounds pretty comforting, especially when I am reading a newspaper.