Aging is dessication

...we begin our lives as noisy dewdrops that will one day learn to crawl, then walk. As science writer Loren Eiseley once put it, people "are a way that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers."

Aging = Drying

But then, with every step we take, we begin to dry. The longer we live, the drier we get. One year after birth, a human baby is only 65 percent water – a ten percent drop, says the U.S. Geological Survey.

Babies are wetter than children. By the time we're adults, the USGS says, adult men are about 60 percent water, adult women 55 percent. Elderly people are roughly half water.

Aging can be described in one way as a gradual dessication.

Maybe this is why babies cry so much, they are just trying to shed some of that 75% water they're storing like little sponges of fat. I am going to go drink a glass of water.

Eminent orphans

Losing a parent is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a child. The world goes topsy-turvy. The psychologist Felix Brown reports that prisoners are two to three times more likely to have lost a parent in childhood than the population as a whole.

But for some people, Malcolm Gladwell points out in his new book, the death of a mother or father is a spur, a propellant that sends them catapulting into life. Because they are on their own, they are forced to persist, to invent, to chart their own way — into a curious category Gladwell dubs "eminent orphans."

There are, he reports, a lot of them. Historian Lucille Iremonger discovered that 67 percent of British prime ministers from the start of the 19th century to the start of World War II lost a parent before the age of 16.

Twelve presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — lost their fathers while they were young.

A psychologist, Marvin Eisenstadt, poured through a number of major encyclopedias, looking for people whose biographies "merited more than one column" — and of 573 people, Gladwell reports, "a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10. By age 15, 34.5 percent had had at least one parent die, and by the age of 20, 45 percent.

I have not read the new Gladwell book yet, but this particular topic is interesting. It suggests that losing a parent while young amplifies the volatility of outcomes for the child, either for the better or the worse.

It's not a coincidence, I suspect, that in so many fairy tales or young adult stories, the hero of heroine has lost one or both parents early in life: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Lion King, Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen. Also, let's not forget the comic book heroes: Batman, Spiderman, Superman, and on and on.

And then there are the famous technology executives who lost a parent early or were adoptees, like Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos. I'd always reserved judgment on this theory since anecdotal confirmation can be statistically anomalous, but the statistics above are intriguing.

While no parent would wish such misfortune on their own children, the question remains as to how to cultivate their grit and resilience with the other forms of stress and adversity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb should write a parenting book on how to make your children antifragile.

How to improve your selfies

Photographer Peter Hurley shares a tip for looking more photogenic in portraits: squinching.

Hurley is big on this: squinching isn’t the same as squinting! The difference is minor but important. When you squint, your top and bottom eyelids close up and your eyes end up all but disappearing — you look neither confident nor self-assured.

With ‘squinching,’ you’re lifting and tightening the lower eyelid, while only letting the top one come down a hair. It might seem like a slight difference (and it is) but it’s a big deal when you get in front of the camera.

The move is said to make you seem self-assured and confident rather than wide-eyed and uncertain, and there are some before/after pics at the link to illustrate the difference.

I've tried it with great results, take a look here.

Show Me Love

I saw Blue is the Warmest Color recently. I recommend seeing it soon if you haven't already. It's unlikely to linger in theaters in most U.S. cities for long given it's a three hour long subtitled French film carrying an NC-17 label (since moving from L.A. to SF I've learned the hard way that not chasing down art house films soon after they're released often means waiting for them to come out on video much much later). 

I'm not the only one who found it worthwhile. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, and Criterion has already announced plans to issue a video edition in February (with a more fully featured version planned for a later date). Leads Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) are both stunning. Exarchopoulos, in particular, wears her emotions so close to the surface that she is always riveting, even as she plays a character constantly trying to calm her inner turmoil: her attraction to women, her insecurity over her relationship with Emma, her deep need to belong.

She can't help herself, though. In long moments of everyday life, and there are many of those in a three hour movie, when she's just chewing her food loudly, or walking around Lille, France, when we read these emotions on her face, they feel as if they've slipped through her face unbeknownst to her. So much of this movie she is unconsciously naked, and for long moments she's literally so; I felt a voyeur's guilt just sitting in my seat, and I would have felt it even notwithstanding the controversial feud between director Abdellatif Kechiche and his leads.

The movie is a bit too long, but Exarchopoulos' face transforms long scenes of Adele doing mundane things into vivid human observational studies. It's not surprising to hear that Kechiche cast her "after he saw her devour a piece of lemon cake." She is attractive, but so are many actresses we choose to promote to the big screen; what she has is the inner life which arcs off of the screen.

It's a good thing she has such an interesting face, because an unusually high percentage of this movie's shots are close-ups. This cinematography choice acts like an amplifier on the movie's emotional intensity. It's as if we're sitting a foot from the actor's faces for most of this movie, and there are very few cuts to wide shots to relieve the intimacy. Even those who don't usually notice the shot size selection in a movie will feel the impact of this style.

Would the movie have been stronger if Kechiche had stuck with the theme of the graphic novel from which this was adapted? In the book, the chief obstacle to Adele and Emma's romance is the homophobic society they live in, but in the movie, the primary threat is a class or cultural divide. Adele is an elementary school teacher, while Emma is a budding young painter. At first, it seems as if homophobia is going to be the theme of the movie. Adele's girlfriends at school are openly hostile to Adele when Emma appears on the scene, and Adele seems reluctant to explain her relationship to Emma to her parents. And then, just like that, the topic is dropped. My mind was still chasing that thread, and one of the reasons the movie feels long is that I felt I'd wasted mental energy chasing that red herring.

If you enjoy Blue is the Warmest Color and want to stay in the category of young lesbian romances (there are enough entries, meaning greater than two, to make this a genre, if a niche one), I recommend Show Me Love by Lukas Moodysson. It's gentler, but it's also about the strange highs and lows of first love. That both movies are about somewhat forbidden lesbian romances only amplifies that sensation of first love, when it feels like the world will never know or understand just how much another person matters to you.