How to save $99

A smarter you is only 15 minutes away!

Aha!  I have been wondering where she’d got to, my smarter self.  She slipped away back in ’92, round about the time Apple stock was selling at $6.00 a share and Nike at 52 cents. 

Of course Blinkist doesn’t really mean it that way.  Smart Carolyn isn’t across the bridge and down I-80 in Berkeley.  The teaser in their online ad implies if I give them $99, and read the non-fiction book summaries they send me, my noodle power will expand in 15 minute increments.  Wouldn’t that be nice? 

It’s a clever new service that reads non-fiction books so you don’t have to.  They’re like Cliff’s Notes for the 21^st Century person who is too preoccupied Tweeting about Instagram to pursue learning on her own. 

Yes, it’s just like back in high school, except now, instead of escaping a death march through The Scarlett Letter, you can become superficially familiar with the cutting edge concepts in science, business and technology others have devoted their lives to exploring.  You’ll know just enough to bluff your way through a casual conversation over latte and a scone.

It’s perfect for busy know-it-alls.

As a dummy and someone drawn to the quick fix like a teenage bride to Hamburger Helper, I’m tempted.  But $99!?  Maybe it’s smarter to hold onto my C-note.

Here’s why:  Blinkist says they read more than 1000 of the best in nonfiction and business books each year, then reduce them into “powerful, memorable distillations” for schmucks like me, so we can Evelyn Woods our way through them and claim we know stuff.

But let’s be real.  With 50 new titles and 40 new audio versions – their “fresh weekly releases added for you each month” – I’m pretty sure I don’t have time for this shortcut.  Just scanning the lists would constitute a detour off my highway of retired bliss into a quagmire of book selection.  It’s hard enough picking which T-shirt to wear each day!  And really, don’t you have to read the rundown to choose the book?  Rather defeats the purpose.

And honestly, if past behavior predicts future success, I concede.  There will come a reason I do not read the abstracts of the books I wish I’d read but really don’t wanna.  Case in point:  My Netflix queue is backed up with a cache of erudite yet unwatched documentaries downloaded from 1998 to present, that I cannot bring myself to delete. 

If only good intentions could boost your IQ! 

And here’s a red flag:  Blinkist doesn’t say how much smarter I’ll be.  That’s an important detail.  Is the formula $99 a year x 15 minutes/number of synopses of arid material deemed too desiccated to digest the old fashioned way = 25 points of intellect?  Or what?

My cost-benefit analysis leaves me dubious.  See, I’ve been through this before.  Just the other day I was promised that I could “get these abs in two weeks!”  The headline on the magazine cover was accompanied by an arrow pointing at the bony midsection of Gwyneth Paltrow. 

BTW – She has one of those non-committal belly buttons – is it an innie or an outie?  I don’t like the looks of it.  She is distressingly long-waisted.  Maybe it’s because her bikini bottoms are drifting lazily south, below the skeletal remains of her baby bump. 

And how does she get those abs?  “Having sex and laughing,” according to a completely out of context quote from her interview in Women’sHealth magazine. 

Well, let me just tell you that Mr. Plath – who is retired now as you may recall, and home all the time with not quite enough to occupy himself – and I are laughing and laughing and…well, here we are, 10 days later, and I don’t think I’m getting those abs. 

Just sayin’.  You can’t believe everything you read.

So when Blinkist promises I can “Learn more, do more, be more—and still spend less time reading;”  I say, I’m doing that already.  Except maybe for the “being more” part.  I mean really.  How can you be more? 

I say you can’t.  You can only be what you can be.  In the philosophical sense of course.  So.  There’s my smarter self. 


And I still have my $99!

Music soothes the old brain

Recently, I found myself in a room with a saxophone.

Apparently, I arrived in the midst one of those “common but mysterious short-term memory failures, [where] people find themselves in a room, without remembering why they ended up there.”

Precisely. 

So, there I was, a little bit breathless, and pondering:  Moments ago I was there, but now I am here.  With a saxophone. 

Why am I here? 

This is not an existential question.  I know why I am here.  I am here to make the world a better place.  Duh.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Nevertheless, in spite of my certainty regarding the meaning of life and my place in the universe, I was hard-pressed to know what-the-what I was doing in that particular room at that specific moment with an E-Flat saxophone.

And then there was the sax itself, staring back at me; also no doubt, wondering how we wound up together.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…!

Researchers say the doorway may be to blame. 

That’s right.  According to Gabriel Radvansky, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, the very act of walking through a doorway may tell your brain since a new scene has begun, it should store prior memories, thereby causing strange memory lapses.  

"Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away… Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

OK.  Perhaps it is existential.  I think I forgot why I came into this room; therefore I am essentially still in the other room. 

Or, maybe these ‘event boundaries’ are my own personal wormholes whereby Morgan Freeman messes with me just because he can. 

In theory, mental event-boundaries are useful (so says Mr. Notre Dame) because they help us organize our mental timelines and remember not just where, but also when a particular event happened.

I get it.  It’s like when Mr. Plath asks me, for example, how long we’ve had Netflix and I piece together the answer by saying, “My hair was still long because the first one of those red envelopes got stuck in it when I thought I had to lick it to seal it and my hair got in the way.  And I thought we’d be able to get ‘Finding Nemo,’ which was about 2004; but of course we never could, which makes me wonder if we should go ahead and subscribe to HBO Go or one of those other movies services?”

It is patching into place memories – like passing through doorway after mental doorway, event boundary after event boundary, until he’s gone into another room wondering why he even asked me such a question in the first place.

But I digress.

I have crossed through a portal into a room which contains a saxophone.  To find out why, I need only retrace my steps, turning back the swinging doors of the event boundaries that brought me here.

Easy peasy.

Let’s see:  I had been wondering, after mistaking an old movie for a good movie, “What is that thing where you forget the ending of a bad movie and wind up watching the whole thing with a nagging suspicion that you’ve seen it before only to find, in the last unraveling of the plot, that you do remember the stupid ending of the thing and you just lost two precious hours of your life watching it again?”

So I went online to find out how to stop doing that annoying thing. 

I found an article at Live Science entitled “People with Dementia May Have Hidden Talents, Strange Case Shows.”

It told the story of a man in South Korea who was formerly meek and mild but got dementia and began saying what he thought at work without regard for the feelings of others.  Kind of like what’s-her-name at Sony Studios who said Angelina Jolie was a self-absorbed brat or whatever.  But then he started playing the saxophone and it made him nicer again.

And I thought, wow, that could be me.  The hidden talent part, I mean.


And I wound up in a room with a saxophone.