Journal of a Sabbatical

receptors

September 8, 1997

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"human beings have built in receptors that religious thoughts just glom onto" - unknown woman holding forth at a nearby table at the Algiers Mark and I were eating at the Algiers in Harvard Square, seated next to a pretentious anthropologist who was lecturing a slightly younger man and woman about the importance of metaphor... a central organizing metaphor... and how human beings were seen in terms of just being large mammals...something about E.O. Wilson... and then the quote about the religious thought receptors floated by. I started giggling. Mark didn't hear it - he had heard the thing about the need for a central organizing metaphor though. Eavesdropping in Harvard Square is so fun. So, is glom an official anthropological term? Exactly where in my brain are the religious thought receptors? How can I tell the difference between them and the pornographic thought receptors? Are there separate receptors for every kind of thought I might ever have? Do I have an oversupply of ornithological thought receptors and an undersupply of greed thought receptors? Didn't E.O. Wilson study insects? Do insects have religious thoughts? A flock of house sparrows just landed on the roof outside my window. All I can see is their tails hanging over the edge of the gutter. They're making a lot of noise poking around in the gutter and their tails keep shifting around. Umm, I just had the windows washed to the tune of $120, so those little sparrows better not defile them. Ah, they just took off en masse. Oh, the spell checker didn't recognize glom. I guess it doesn't have the anthropological dictionary. Later on, Mark and I had coffee at the Caffe Paradiso - way more betterer than Starbucks. A woman nearby was talking about how many more pregnant lesbians than straight women were at the obstetrician's office and how she didn't think she wanted another kid because she'd "survived a nephew and a niece". Survived them? Are they dead? Or did they try to kill her? English is such a weird language. Think I'll go have some coffee to tune up my religious thought receptors.

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