I Will Disrupt Your Coffee

Introduction

I want to disrupt your coffee.  I’m using the word “disrupt” because it’s so current and powerful.  Dang it!  I just realized maybe it’s already passé… maybe “disrupt” was current when I started the sentence but lapsed by the end.  Whatever.  I’m going to use it anyway.

(By the way, I’m just being flippant with the title of this post.  I hope to disrupt your coffee, but I don’t kid myself that I have much influence over my readers.)

What I’m saying is, I’m a newcomer to drinking coffee—in the last week or so I finally learned how to make it, albeit in a very old-fashioned way—but I’m going to have the audacity to try to get you, a coffee veteran, to change your approach to this ancient beverage.  That’s what I understand this whole “disruption” thing to be.

The ask

I’m going to ask you to consider drinking your coffee black from now on.  It’s that simple.  I’ll provide the rationale as we go along.  (If you already drink your coffee black, read this anyway because it might give you a pleasurable smugness.)

I am emboldened to suggest this because I’m not the first one to do so.  I learned this when talking to my daughter about the soda tax passed two years ago in nearby Berkeley.  Berkeley is the first city in the U.S. to pass an excise tax on sugary drinks, and according to this article it’s working out well.  Berkeley’s law covers “flavored coffee drinks,” a category which includes not just premixed, bottled beverages but also any coffee to which a barista adds sweetener:  “The distributor [pays] a tax based on the quantity of sweetener used according to the printed instructions,” according to this article.  (If you add your own sugar, oddly enough, it doesn’t get taxed.  A little loophole, I guess.)

So, how is it that Berkeley voters—despite fierce opposition from the American Beverage Association—gave this complicated proposition a landslide victory?  Simple:  Berkeleyites (aka Berzerkers, Berkleyistas) are enemies of freedom.  I don’t mean to imply that that’s a bad thing.  I myself am an enemy of freedom.  Society gives us freedom and what do we do with it?  We read Us magazine, buy microwave popcorn, and rudely lash out at strangers via the Internet.

What’s wrong with cream and sugar?

Look, I have no real problem with putting cream and sugar in coffee and am not here to render any expert opinion on what a cup of coffee ought to be.  As coffee achievers go, I’m pretty much a dabbler; I only have coffee when I really need the caffeine (though that’s more and more often these days).  For most of my life, I tended to dress up that rare cup of coffee with sugar, or maybe Sugar In the Raw if I was feeling all fancy, and either cream, half-and-half, or milk.  This increased the charisma of the beverage, and to this day I enjoy that flavor.

But then the other morning I had an epiphany.  I was rushing to get on a very early conference call (the downside of being the odd West Coast employee) and made up some instant coffee.  The brand I use—never mind what it is, especially since I’m about to bag on it—is fairly upscale and describes itself as “amazingly close to a freshly brewed cup of coffee.”  I used to tolerate this product okay, but either my jar has gone bad or my tastes have changed… this time, it tasted awful.  It wasn’t just bitter—it was sour.  I added plenty of sugar and milk but they didn’t help.  And then I thought, wait—is that what we use cream and sugar for?  To dampen the flavor?  That might make sense with a lousy product, but aren’t most coffee drinkers buying pretty good stuff?  The fresh beans, the Peets, the Keurigs, and all that?  Why would you dilute that?

Think of it this way.  Imagine you lined up a row of giant mugs, each a quarter filled, with a variety of coffees progressing from barebones to deluxe:  Brim, McDonald’s, Peet’s from frozen ground beans, Peet’s from their store, Peet’s from beans you grind to order, and whatever is served at the Four Seasons Hotel in Florence.  If you took a sip of each, you’d surely notice a great range of quality.  Now add a normal amount of sugar and cream:  you’d still notice a big difference, even if you used the same grade A organic cream and pure unadulterated cane sugar in each mug.  Now imagine adding more and more cream and sugar to each mug, tasting each at intervals.  The difference from one cup to the next would get blurred.  Eventually they’d all taste the same (i.e., like sweet cream).

So assuming you’ve settled on a favorite brand of coffee, something very upscale and high-quality, perhaps to the point that you even have a favorite bean and/or a favorite roast … why would you then go and add these very basic products—cream or milk and/or sugar—which blunt your coffee’s distinctive flavor?

Is coffee too bitter to drink black?

Perhaps you just like coffee better with cream and sugar, full stop.  And no, it’s not because you’re some kind of wuss and find the undiluted flavor of coffee too bitter to handle.  You don’t mind the bitterness; you just like a little cream and sugar, and you are this close to abandoning this essay except that on some level you’re enjoying your growing hatred of me and my unsophisticated opinions.

You know what?  I agree with you—coffee isn’t that bitter!  Nobody is trying to cover up the flavor!  Meanwhile, even if it is a tiny bit bitter, humans can learn to enjoy bitterness.  I give you the India Pale Ales that are all the rage nowadays.  I really do love them, and know from personal experience that they’re an acquired taste.  I remember the first time I had a Racer 5, which—at 75 IBUs—is a pretty bitter beer.  Man, I hated it.  But now it’s one of my favorites.  (My absolute favorite is the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which is rated at 90 IBUs; when I tried that one for the first time, I was far enough into IPAs that I loved it right away.)

And—though I’m no expert on coffee—I gather that to the extent that it is bitter, this is a failing.  This article suggests four possible causes of coffee being bitter:  it’s brewed wrong, the grind size is wrong, the water is too hot, or the brewing equipment is dirty.  So a really good cup shouldn’t be that bitter anyway.  So why do we sweeten it?

I don’t know for sure how people get into the habit of putting sugar and cream in their coffee, but I’d guess that when they started drinking it, the flavor struck them as unusual and they dressed it up to make it more familiar.  From there it just became habit.

“But wait!” you may be thinking.  “It’s not that!  It’s just that coffee with cream and sugar tastes really good!  You’re overthinking this!”

What makes us enjoy a flavor?

Let’s not be so hasty.  Let’s think about this.  What makes us decide something tastes good?  I read some article on sweetness and I’m not going to do try to dig that up, but it was something to the effect that we humans are hardwired to like the flavor of things that are calorically dense.  This was an evolutionary adaptation, a way nature gets us to lay in all the calories we can when they’re available, to avoid famine.  So a sweet tooth is pretty unsophisticated, isn’t it?  Like kids with their damn sodas and candy and Froot Loops!  Loving sweet things is natural … but I think it’s also kind of weak.  Fat isn’t so different … it’s calorically dense, too.

But coffee?  Black coffee has almost no calories.  Maybe we like it because, as described by this article, “caffeine enhances dopamine (DA) signaling in the brain.”  In other words, coffee produces a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.  But a) people also like decaf, and b) if this was only about caffeine, people would just pop NoDoz.  So coffee provides a more sophisticated enjoyment than mere dopamine response.  It appeals to our cultured side, not just our primitive impulses.  (Maybe this is why dogs and cats don’t crave it.)

So why blend this acquired taste with extra stuff?  Is it really necessary to pile these treats on top of each other?  If so, why not make every cup of coffee an Irish coffee by adding whisky, and/or always having a donut with it?  

I have two problems with this treat-upon-treat enhancement of coffee.  First off, the cheap dopamine buzz of fat and sugar seems like a vulgar addition to a fairy sophisticated product.  Nobody adds sugar or fat to an IPA, after all, and  I’m not the only person who considers it a travesty to put corn-syrup-laden ketchup on a hot dog.  Second, coffee isn’t a treat—for so many of us, it’s a habit we indulge several times a day.  If we can learn to enjoy it on its own merit, we don’t only elevate our taste, but we avoid gratuitous sugar and fat (and the temptation to ever make do with non-dairy creamer and/or Sweet'N Low).

I’m not saying we should cut out cream and sugar entirely—just that we get over the habit of always including them.  I think they really are just a habit, a rote add-on to the coffee ritual.  I remember watching a colleague customizing his Starbuck’s coffee:  first a splash of milk, then a splash of half-and-half, then two packets of sugar, then a little shake of cocoa on top.  He assembled this concoction several times a day.  I asked him, “Why not add the sugar first, when the coffee is hotter, so it’ll dissolve better?”  He shrugged and said, “I’ve always done it this way.”

Trust me:  it’s not hard to learn to like coffee black.  It took me all of three cups to see the light, whereas it took at least a dozen introductions to IPA before I acquired the taste.  (I’d inherited a bunch of it after throwing a party a few years back, and by the time they were gone, I was a convert.)  Black coffee is actually pretty dang tasty.  And you know what?  Now that I have a taste for it, I’m more versatile:  I can drink it black as a matter of course, but next time I’m at a fancy restaurant with the cute little pitcher of cream and the little hinge-lidded cup of fancy brown sugar cubes, I can fuss pleasurably with all of that because it’ll still taste good to me.

One more rationale

I’ll give you one more reason to drink your coffee black:  it makes you more cool.  At least, drinking black coffee makes me feel a bit more cool.  Not many behaviors can achieve this sense of cool.  I could smoke a cigarette, but that would just make me an idiot.  I could drive a sporty little convertible, but that would feel like a pose.  I could wear a badass leather jacket and/or ride a Harley, but—being a forty-seven year old dad—I would look ridiculous.  But to like my coffee black … that’s a little bit of cool that is still within my reach.

(This isn’t a male macho thing.  Drinking coffee black is also cool for a woman.  For example, the woman celebrated in the Cake song “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” would surely drink her coffee black.)

Call to action

To be clear, I’m not asking you to give up cream and sugar altogether.  I’m suggesting that the next time you have a cup of coffee—which is probably only hours from now—you not add anything to it.  Give this a taste.  If it doesn’t appeal to you, taste it some more and contemplate the flavor for a moment.  What’s wrong with it?  Couldn’t you learn to like this? 

Take like a week.  See if you don’t develop a taste for pure, adulterated coffee.  Assuming you do, now you can ask if there’s any reason to go back to cream and sugar.  And if there is—if you just plain enjoy that more—well that’s fine too and now you know your preference is real, and not just a habit born of unthinking repetition.

(Should you put milk in your tea?  That’s a whole other question….)

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No Mo' NoDoz



Introduction

My beloved NoDoz has been off the shelves for almost a year. (Okay, it’s not actually beloved. I don’t love NoDoz the way I love, say, a good burrito, or the way you love a good cup of coffee.) This post concerns a slightly frightening peek into the drug manufacturing business; why I don’t drink coffee; why I value NoDoz enough to miss it; and ultimately why caffeine pills are underrated.

No mo’ NoDoz

I ran out of NoDoz early last spring. First I just figured Safeway was all out. So I went to Elephant Pharmacy, then Rite Aid. None there either. Nobody could tell me why they didn’t have it. Finally, at Walgreens, the clerk referred me to the pharmacist, who said there had been a recall. He didn’t have any details, so I went online.

As it turns out, the company that makes No-Doz, Novartis, recalled several of its drugs, including Excedrin, NoDoz, Bufferin, and Gas-X, because it “became aware of … broken and chipped pills, and inconsistent bottle packaging that could cause pills to be mixed up.” One reader commented on the article, “I feel sorry for the people who thought they took Gas-X, but got NoDoz ... Now they’re up all night farting!” But seriously, this could be a big problem because Novartis also manufactures prescription drugs such as Percocet and extended-release morphine at this plant. Imagine a long-distance trucker getting Percocet instead of NoDoz.

Another article described the desperate measures some took because of the recall: “Can’t find No-Doz? No problem, just drink more coffee. But migraine sufferers are posting on blogs that they are unable to relieve their massive headaches that are too strong for Tylenol or Motrin. Bidders were running up the price of Excedrin bottles to $50 or more on eBay, that’s how desperate they are for relief.” As the article points out, what these hapless bidders missed is that Excedrin is just a combination of Acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine—all easy to find. Their advice to NoDozers, though, doesn’t apply to me. I’ve never been a coffee drinker and am not about to start.

Not a coffee achiever

Do you remember the TV ads put out by the National Coffee Association in the ‘80s? The most memorable is the one featuring the washed-up rock band Heart. “You are the new American society … the movers and the shakers … you are the new coffee generation! Join the coffee achievers!” As it happened, when these ads came out I was at the age where I could have started drinking coffee. The idea of a drink that could help me achieve was appealing (more appealing at that point than alcohol; no alcohol industry trade association has tried to launch an “alcohol achiever” campaign). My brother did get into coffee, and took to brewing up some pretty thick stuff—the coffee that eats like a meal, you could say. “So are you a coffee achiever now?” I asked him. “Well, I got the coffee part down,” he replied. His coffee didn’t appeal to me and I never did pick up the habit.

By now perhaps you’re exasperated. If I don’t drink coffee, why do I mess around with NoDoz? And more importantly, why don’t I drink coffee to begin with, when it’s so darn good?

Well, to begin with, I’m cheap, and yet tend toward expensive tastes. For years I never much liked beer, but only because I was sampling Coors and Meister Brau. When I tried good beer (I think Fat Tire, when it first came out, was the eye-opener for me), I liked it right away. That naturally led to an appreciation for Belgian beers like Duvel, and for pricey microbrews (my latest find being Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA at like $13 for a 4-pack). The only way to keep expensive tastes in line with my Bay Area mortgage is to avoid cultivating an appreciation for expensive stuff like fine wine and coffee.

Meanwhile, caffeine is addictive. Of course, so is alcohol, but there’s a difference: most beer drinkers are not alcoholics, while most coffee drinkers are caffeine addicts. An article I wrote years ago about caffeine ruffled a few feathers; some people really don’t like that “addict” label. But I don’t mean it pejoratively; I am talking about addiction not in terms of junkies, but as a simple matter of whether or not your habit involves withdrawal symptoms when you don’t get your beverage.

Needless to say, coffee shop chains will exploit this. Consider this article about Starbucks raising the price of a 12-oz. coffee in Manhattan to $2.01 (with tax), forcing customers to either carry change or use a credit card. Asked about this, a Starbucks VP said that “only a small proportion of customers buy just a tall coffee when they visit a Starbucks.” How nice for them. I don’t think it’s overly cynical to suppose that the extra cent is designed to drive customers toward paying with credit, which is known to drive up a customer’s total tab. Without a coffee habit, I avoid that entire retail temptation.

Coffee, of course, is much more than an addictive beverage. For so many people it is a life pleasure, and a habit, and often a ritual. The habit and ritual, I’d guess, have at least as strong a pull as the addiction. The guy with his own very expensive Italian-made espresso machine, who grinds his own beans, is at one end of a coffee spectrum; at the other end is Folgers and/or the free stuff you get at the office. I’m not on this spectrum. My use of caffeine is less a ritual than a technique: I use it to boost my athletic performance.

Why NoDoz?

“But wait,” anybody with half a clue is saying. “Why not get your performance-boosting caffeine and enjoy a delicious, steaming mug of joe at the same time by being a non-addicted, occasional coffee achiever?” One: like I said, I’m cheap (a NoDoz tablet costs like a dime). Two, I don’t have much time to ride, and if I’m fussing with grinding beans and then waiting for the coffee to drip into a pot, I’m cutting into my riding time. The very prospect of moving quietly around the kitchen brewing coffee at 5:30 in the morning is enough to keep me in bed.

But, you protest, the club ride meets at the coffee shop … what could make more sense than grabbing a cup there? Well, brewed coffee isn’t a very precise dose. I base this on an article I read about Starbucks. I gather that Starbucks’ popularity, as with so many chains, derives from its quality control—it must be among the leading chains in this domain. And yet its quality control isn’t actually that good, in terms of predictable caffeine quantity per cup. Maybe that doesn’t matter to a coffee achiever with a tolerance for caffeine, but it matters to me. NoDoz delivers exactly 200 mg of caffeine per tablet. They claim this is about the same as a cup of coffee. (I could swear that when I started using it, the package said it was about the same as two cups of coffee.) But, the article states, “A recent laboratory test [McCusker R.R.; Goldberger B.A.; Cone E.J., Caffeine Content of Specialty Coffees, Journal of Analytical Toxicology, Vol. 27, October 2003, pp 520-522] sampled a series of Starbucks Breakfast Blend brewed coffees. The caffeine dose varied from 299.5mg right up to a massive 564.4mg per 16oz cup! What’s astonishing is that the 6 samples were obtained from the same outlet on 6 consecutive days.” Man … 565 mg. If I got that much caffeine I think I’d be hallucinating.

And another thing!

My tradition of NoDozing has been further reinforced by another article I came across recently comparing the benefit of coffee vs. pure caffeine. In a recent study, athletes’ performance was measured in five separate trials with different products administered: placebo pill, caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee with caffeine added back in, and pure caffeine. The results? “Surprisingly, the only trial which resulted in any improvement in performance was when subjects ingested pure caffeine. In other words, ingesting caffeine in the form of coffee did not affect performance compared to the placebo trial. Thus, it was concluded that there is a compound in coffee that appears to inhibit the performance enhancing effects of caffeine, and to obtain the performance enhancing effects of this drug, pure caffeine needs to be ingested.”

Naturally, I wouldn’t blindly assume this study was valid. I like to do my own tests (such as this one) to see how such reports match my own experience. You might assume that my own bias might skew the results of my test. Well, the beauty of this is that I happened to run the tests long before the article came out. I wasn’t drinking coffee pre-ride to measure anything; I just tried it out. Because I keep an absurdly detailed training diary, the results of these efforts are well documented.

In both trials, I had a poor performance riding the indoor trainer after drinking coffee. I measure performance by how high I was able to get my heart rate, and how long over my target zone. (In the following accounts, “TAZ” means “time above zone.”) In both workouts I averaged far below the 19 minutes of TAZ I normally get (i.e., when using No-Doz alone). Here are the accounts of my coffee-fueled efforts.

12/14/10 Tuesday, 1:35:39 duration, 8:24 TAZ

I felt I needed a secret weapon this morning and got out the Folgers crystals. I’d never tried it before. I guess my wife’s mom must have bought them in frustration at our not having any coffee around here. So this is in addition to my NoDoz. I already have a strong association between this brand and my workouts, because on the trainer I listen to a lot of rap, including Eminem, who in one song raps, “Wake up and smell the Folgers crystals!” So I figured that literally smelling the Folgers, and of course drinking it, might inspire me to go harder. I know … grasping at straws. Anyhow, I managed to get a bit of TAZ toward the end of this tour, but mostly it just sucked.

12/16/10 Thursday, 1:00:56, 1:04 TAZ

I tried to motivate for a big effort this morning, but to no avail. My new game-changing secret weapon, Folgers coffee, is actually useless. I was trying to figure out, as I made the coffee this morning, what the Folgers crystals remind me of, and finally it hit me: Drano. They’re like brown Drano, and they have the same effect on my plumbing. Not much other effect, though. None of my other trainer tricks were doing much good either. The rap music was almost demoralizing. As Obie Trice yelled in my ear, “I’m hittin’ harder than those Hiroshima-type bombs!” I was thinking, “I’m hitting weaker than those plastic Wiffle-type bats.”

(If you think I fabricated the above study for the purpose of this post, click here.)

Meanwhile, I have other anecdotal evidence of the power of pure caffeine. About 2/3 of the way through a brutal 130-mile ride over Mount Hamilton, through Livermore, and back to Berkeley with some guys on my bike club, I was feeling pretty shot and went for a NoDoz. I split it with one of the guys, Steve Kromer, because he’d already been dragging the rest of us around and I hoped to draft him all the way home. This backfired, though: he started to feel so good following the half-NoDoz that he split off from our ride to set off alone on something more ambitious. He rode solo over Morgan Territory Road, then up and down Mount Diablo before returning home over Lomas Cantadas, a brutal climb. He ended up with 170 miles on the day with 15,000 feet of climbing. Was it the NoDoz? Well, I’d seen him drink coffee plenty of times without getting a crazy surge like that.

Still no mo’ NoDoz

Amazingly, Novartis still hasn’t gotten NoDoz back on the shelves. It’s not a problem for me. My brand loyalty to NoDoz over Vivarin is based only on a) Vivarin being unaccountably more expensive, and b) Vivarin being a round tablet that cannot be broken in half, while NoDoz is a narrow, scored tablet that I can easily divide. (A whole tablet before an evening ride would keep me up all night.) In case you’re thinking of becoming a non-coffeee caffeine achiever, Walgreens has a NoDoz-shaped house-brand caffeine tablet that’s nicely scored for sharing. (You getting this, Kromer?)
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Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media

Introduction

I attended a lecture recently about parenting.  The speaker, a Ph.D. psychologist, talked a lot about biological factors such as neurotransmitters; specifically, about how motivating children can often be a contest between the parents’ goals for the child and the various dopamine sources available to him.  Put more simply, it’s really hard to get a kid to do his homework when he’s engrossed in a movie, video game, or the Internet.  “Just a sec” is the kid’s equivalent of the snooze button.

Another thread of the lecture involved the ways evolving society is making it even harder for kids to focus on activities like schoolwork, given the new distractions facing them, like texting and social media.  In addition to traditional sources of dopamine (e.g., calorie-dense food, booze, drugs) the lecturer mentioned “social commerce,” which she described as the kind of widespread but shallow interactions offered by sites like Facebook and Twitter.  These interactions, she declared, produce more dopamine than the deeper connections with close friends and family.

In this post I examine the intersection of dopamine, social media, and kids.  Whether or not you ultimately agree with my observations and philosophies, perhaps I’ll help you to ponder some good questions.

Dopamine and me

Dopamine isn’t happiness, and doesn’t lead to happiness.  It is the neurotransmitter most associated with pleasure.  From an evolutionary perspective, its job was to motivate the kind of behavior—e.g., eating as much calorie-dense food as possible—that would increase the chances of survival.  (If cavemen ate like supermodels, the human race wouldn’t have made it.)  Dopamine production is stimulated also by sex, novelty, high risk activities, rest, and sleep—anything ancient man needed to survive.  In modern society, dopamine is also produced by winning (and its illusory cousins like scoring in a video game), shopping, passive entertainment like TV, and even TV ads (which provide novelty and, I suppose, the notion of hope).

Personally, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with dopamine.  “Love” because hey, what’s not to love about pleasure?  Hate because I’ve experienced how dopamine can manipulate me.  As a teenager, especially during the year after my parents’ divorce, I got pretty heavily into TV, recording some pretty stupid programs and watching them all afternoon after school.  I felt glutted by cheap spectacle but was too lazy to figure out something better to do.  To this day I’m easily mesmerized by TV, as is my wife; our solution is to eschew it entirely (i.e., we don’t have cable, nor an antenna).  Occasionally we’ll go on a video binge, renting five or six episodes of, say, “30 Rock” and watching them over the course of an evening or two.

I’m similarly wary of caffeine.  As an impressionable youth I remember my dad getting almost panicky during a road trip due to caffeine withdrawal.  He explained, as we took an off-ramp to a convenience store, that if he didn’t have coffee every two hours he got a splitting headache.  I found this really disturbing, and as an adult I still prefer not to be beholden to caffeine (or any substance).  Don’t get me wrong:  I love the way caffeine makes me feel—but I also fear how it can enable us to deprive ourselves of sleep.  Meanwhile, I’m as cheap as they come and refuse to pay for Starbucks, fancy beans, all the equipment, etc.  So I use No-Doz, and only before bike rides.

Beyond these practical matters, I have an ideological problem with dopamine:  it makes me feel cheap—a slave to my most basic desires, like a lab hamster hammering a button to get food pellets.  The craving for something is base; the will power to resist this craving feels, to me, more evolved.  (Yes, I’m aware that though I am not a hamster in an experiment, I may yet resemble the dog trained to resist eating the milk-bone balanced on its snout until the master gives the okay.  Except that I am both the dog and the master.  My discipline is of a sort Don DeLillo has aptly described:  “You are making your own little totalitarian society ... where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people.”)

My neurotransmitter of choice?  Endorphins.  These I must earn, and getting them never feels like a failure of discipline.  So many desserts are advertized as “guilt-free”—note that there’s no need to construct the notion of a guilt-free workout.  But this isn’t just an ego thing.  Endorphins are simply more powerful.  If dopamine tells the brain, “that was nice,” endorphins offer actual exhilaration.

Dopamine and kids

Self-control such as I’ve just described is largely unavailable to kids.  I have often pondered how my own daughters—little angels though they may be—often seem a manifestation of pure appetite.  I’ll give you an example.  My younger daughter, when she was about four years old, got too much chocolate on Easter.  During the drive home from her grandma’s she hurled in the car.  A week or two later, at a birthday party, she asked if she could have a second “muffin.”  (She meant “cupcake,” but having never seen one before she thought it was just the tastiest damn muffin she’d ever had.)  I said to her, “No, that would be too much sugar.  Remember that giant chocolate rabbit you ate on Easter?  Do you really want to throw up like that again?”  She thought about this for a couple seconds and replied, “Yes!  Yes I do!”

Advertisers take full advantage of this unbridled desire, and peddle appalling things like sugary cereals directly to kids, harnessing the youngsters’ amazing whining power.  Advertisers push especially hard on teenagers, taking advantage of the awful combination of spending money and the lack of a fully formed prefrontal cortex (the seat of restraint and good judgment).  There’s another reason my family doesn’t have cable TV:  commercials.  I refuse to go toe-to-toe with the great evil advertising minds.  It’s much easier to remove the temptation than to fight it.

So it is with the ice cream truck.  You may think of this truck as a standard part of childhood, something you may even feel nostalgia for.  Not me.  In my book, the ice cream man is a terrorist.  My brothers and I would be happily playing with friends, and then we’d heard the music of the approaching truck, and the play would be forgotten as our friends would run inside and beg their moms for money—a fusillade of relentless pleading—and then, money in hand, they’d tear out into the street toward that truck as though their lives depended on it.  Then they’d eat their overpriced ice cream in front of my brothers and me as the truck drove on, seeding unrest through every neighborhood in its path.

Am I just bitter, envious to have missed out?  No, that’s not it.  Even as a kid I had found it a disgusting spectacle, from beginning to end.  Fast-forward a couple of decades:  the first time, as a parent, that I heard the ice cream truck coming, I launched a preemptive strike:  “Run to the windows, girls!” I cried.  “It’s the music truck!”  Fascinated, my daughters asked me what it was all about.  “He just drives around, playing music for kids,” I said.  After two or three years of this, my older daughter said, “Hey!  He’s not just playing music, he’s selling ice cream!”  I casually replied, “Yeah, well, that too.”  She fired back, “Can I have some money?”  I said, “Absolutely not, ever.  Don’t even ask.”

Dopamine and social media

It’s all well and good to make fun of kids and their cravings, but adults are pretty good at facilitating their own dopamine production:  faster, sportier cars; premium tequila and countless new microbrews; ever-fancier coffee beans and grinders and home espresso makers; clever ways to introduce dopamine into exercise, like heart rate monitors and Strava; and, to an explosive degree, social media.

To reiterate, social media serves a different role than close friends and family.  Close relationships are probably more closely associated with serotonin; in any event, they aren’t the same thing as social commerce.  When a person from your past comes out of nowhere and “friends” you, showing that he or she hasn’t forgotten about you and wants to get back in touch, that’s got to feel good.  I reckon that each time somebody posts something to your wall, you get a little dopamine hit.  I googled “facebook dopamine” and right away found an essay describing how the dopamine produced by social media is so powerful as to be addictive.  This essay cites a study of how often, and in what contexts, people are stopping what they’re doing to check in on their social media sites.  For example, 34% of those under 35 actually admit to doing this during a date.  (We could almost infer from this that social media offers more dopamine than sex, because after all, who’s going to get lucky after being so unconscionably rude to his date?)

I am not above this quasi-addiction.  It kind of crept up on me.  In general, I’ve had a policy of avoiding social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  As much as anything this stems from a “New Yorker” cartoon I saw way back in 1997:  a man sits at a computer, and his little daughter, in her pajamas holding a teddy bear, taps him on the shoulder; he says, “Honey, please don’t talk to Daddy when he’s in a chat room.”  Such a prescient cartoon, anticipating the bizarre epidemic of people ignoring those around them in favor of a burst of off-the-cuff text from an unseen correspondent.  (The comic comeuppance continues in the “New Yorker” here and here.)

I will acknowledge that I’ve enjoyed Twitter occasionally, following professional cyclists.  There is sometimes a refreshing unguarded quality to athletes’ tweets, particularly when their competition-induced neurotransmitters are still firing away.  (In fact, one team has instituted a one-hour moratorium on all post-race tweets from its riders.)  But I can’t dish it out:  I am certain that nothing in my life warrants a blow-by-blow of my activities, and it would be a bored person indeed who would bother to read them.  Moreover, I think every tweet is a partial lie.  Why?  Because whatever you claim to be doing, you’re actually doing that plus tweeting.  If I were to tweet, “I’m hanging out with my kids,” and you were able to ask my kids what I was doing at that moment, they’d say, “Playing with his phone.”

Where dopamine has gotten hold of me through social media is through this very blog.  When I conceived of albertnet, my goal was simply to write little essays and stories and have some sort of audience, however small or random.  It was never my goal to have a reciprocal communication with anybody, and for the first couple years it was almost impossible to know who, if anybody, was reading my blog.  Occasionally somebody would post a comment, or e-mail me about a post, but that was, and is, exceedingly rare—which is fine.  I’m not trying to “deliver an audience,” but to write whatever I want and if someone reads it, great.  I joked about my readership apprehension and “screw the reader” philosophy in a post a couple years ago:  “Where this blog is concerned, ‘screw the reader’ may end up meaning ‘screw exactly one reader’ (sorry Mom).”

But then, some months ago, a wealth of statistics suddenly became available to me.  Now, I can look at pageviews for the last day, week, month, and all-time.  I can see who is reading what posts at this very moment.  I can see where in the world they hail from, and I can see how they found my post.  (Sometimes the search terms are very funny; one hit on my vasectomy post was a search on the phrase “will vasectomy make my testicles droop.”  Sometimes the search terms are flattering, like the search on “albertnet suffering cold-pressor test,” clearly from a repeat viewer.) 

What I discovered is that this blog is more popular than I had ever thought (though it’s entirely possible pageviews represent Google misfires rather than people actually reading my posts).  Now I find myself tracking the pageviews of every new post.  Whenever that number is higher than I expected, or just higher than it was yesterday, I get a little hit of dopamine.  I must be, because I have come to find this activity oddly compelling, in the way that beating your old score at a video game is compelling.  That is, in that dopamine-glutted way that starts to make me feel like a loser.  I’m strongly considering swearing off pageview viewing altogether, or strictly rationing it.  But I’m not sure I have the will power.

Dopamine + kids + social media

Consider that I, an annoyingly disciplined person, distrustful of dopamine response, and with a fully-formed prefrontal cortex, am all but addicted to Blogger pageview stats—probably the least compelling of all social media.  How, then, can a teenager even stand a chance against it?  Here is a source of dopamine that many, if not most, teenagers have unlimited access to.  It doesn’t cost money, they’re not going to get carded, and in many cases their parents give them carte blanche, assuming access to social media is as innocuous, ubiquitous, and mainstream as running water or electricity.

And yet, sites like Facebook strike me as a social minefield for teenagers in particular.  I’ve heard enough about adults offending one another, embarrassing themselves, wishing they hadn’t friended somebody, wondering how to extract themselves, etc.  And these are the people who have presumably learned how to get along—at least, who should be closer to social poise than they were in junior high.  As the writer Lore Segal has written (in a telegram sent by one of her characters), “'PROTOCOL IS THE ART OF NOT REPEAT NOT LIVING BY NATURAL HUMAN FEELING.”  This protocol is far beyond the grasp of the average teenager.  Isn’t the hormone-ravaged teen existence hard enough without a constantly evolving online social world?  Probably the worst aspect of social media is that it takes those terribly embarrassing teen moments that , a generation ago, would have faded into distant memory, and makes them permanent.

I’m grateful that the sudden rise of social media has taken place before my own kids are really old enough to participate.  This is giving my wife and me a chance to figure out, in advance, a family Internet acceptable use policy.  It probably sounds like I’m joking and I admit that phrase sounds corny, but I’m serious.  It’s very tempting to assume that anything involving technology is good for our kids.  Parents brag about it:  “I can’t figure out how to set up a new printer, but my ten-year-old is a whiz at it!”  People talk of “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants,” and a parent could be excused for believing that facility with computers and the Internet might make his or her child the next Mark Zuckerberg. But this idea is actually pretty absurd. I recently read a newspaper article about an expensive private school in the Silicon Valley that bans computers and other high-tech gadgets; one of the parents, a Google employee with a computer science degree, reminds us that computers and related technologies are designed to be idiot-proof: “It’s super easy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. ”

In other words, facility with computers doesn’t say much about a young person’s intelligence or career prospects; the ability to consume any technology has little do to with creating it. To put it another way, your kid isn’t going to be the next great food scientist just because he enjoys eating at McDonald’s.  So my strategy as a parent is to restrict my kids' access to computers and other passive entertainment sources in favor of books and other traditional kid stuff. 

Meanwhile, there's the issue of security. After taking great pains to put our kids in a good school and thus surround them with good peers, my wife and I aren’t about to let them roam the great untamable Internet unheeded.  In the context of the Internet, the movie ratings system seems kind of quaint; if you had to rate the Internet as a whole, it would have to be X—but there’s no ticket taker to turn kids away.  What’s to keep kids from unknowingly corresponding with wackos, and/or stumbling on images they come to wish they hadn’t?

Meanwhile, Internet gaming runs from the educational to the merely time-wasting to the hideously violent; why should I let my kids decide what’s appropriate?  (At least they’re both girls.)  I let my older daughter play two kinds of games:  those specifically assigned in school, and those that teach her the Dvorak keyboard layout.  Nothing else is even on the table.  Even if they found suitable games, I’m not about to allow them, because video games are addictive—they create a dopamine-fueled drive for bigger scores, driving a compulsion to play without any legitimate reward.  I am not just speculating.  I was a videot myself as a teenager (though at least then I had to ride my bike across town and compete for gaming machines with other non-virtual youths).

Parents I’ve talked to have responded to this approach by saying, “Won’t depriving your kids just create a pent-up demand, and cause them to rebel and go too far in the opposite direction?” Perhaps—but I’m betting it won’t. In my household videos are severely restricted (if I had to put our policy in words it would go something like “In general you may not watch them, though we’ll make exceptions as we see fit”). Here, my younger daughter cleverly tried to get permission for a video while my wife was on the phone. It was a good strategy ... maybe next time it’ll actually work.



Has this policy created an outsized craving for videos? Not really—my daughters love watching them, but their expectations are realistic and they don’t often hassle my wife and me about it. For example: the other evening my older daughter put in a video. (She’d cleared it with her mom.) I was happy to watch with her and her sister because, as I’ve described before, I do enjoy some good lowbrow entertainment and the movie was “Monsters Vs. Aliens.” Imagine my surprise when, after ten or fifteen minutes, my daughter abruptly turned it off and said, “I have to practice piano.” Equally shocking was that her little sister took this in stride.

What about older kids?  When my daughters are teenagers, will I let them have Facebook or Google Plus accounts?  I’m conflicted on that one.  Part of me wants to say “no,” and the other part of me wants to say “hell, no.”  Will they get these accounts anyway, behind my back?  Possibly.  But at least they won’t have smartphones to stare into—on that point my wife and I are firmly resolved.  Part of this is selfish:  when I’m with my kids, I want them to engage with me, not think of me as mere background static as they pour their attention into a handheld electronic device.  It’s bad enough when their noses are in books and I can’t get their attention; at least reading is something I can share with them, rather than having them look down upon me as a dopey old person on the wrong side of the digital divide.  (The smartphone may be the most sophisticated parental-estrangement device ever created; click here for details.)  And who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and three years from now the social media revolution will have fizzled, like disco, breakdancing, and the Macarena.

But wait, you might say, the Internet is so cool, and opens up such a wide world of worthwhile stuff, and social media enables your kids to connect with friends even when they can’t get together in person!  What’s wrong with that?  What kind of deprivation-obsessed fascist are you?  What are you gonna do, send your ten-year-old outside by herself to blow bubbles with the little party-favor wand from her sister’s birthday?  No, we don’t keep that junk around.  Check this out:

I’d researched how to make my own bubble mix at home, but it looked complicated and I needed glycerin and where would I find that?  And yet, my daughter somehow figured out how to make the best bubble solution I’ve ever seen, so robust you don’t even need a wand.  It’s amazing how resourceful a kid can be when she doesn’t have anything “better” (i.e., easier) to do.

How to Write a Sonnet

Introduction

I find myself unexpectedly caffeinated. I normally only use caffeine for bike rides or emergencies, but just now my wife, who drinks black tea throughout the day, had to suddenly run off somewhere and left behind a perfectly brewed and tuned cup of PG Tips. (Tuning has something to do with milk.) So I’ve wiped the trace of lipstick off the mug and made it mine. This caffeine injection, and some Metallica I’m listening to, have given me the courage to forge ahead on a difficult post about a surprisingly easy literary enterprise: writing a sonnet.

I realize there’s probably not much of a market for an essay on this topic. It’s bad enough trying to get people to read sonnets, much less write them, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from myself about writing, it’s this: screw the reader. Entertainment and the arts have bent over backwards trying to cater to their audience, and look where it’s gotten us: reality TV and “Us” magazine. Of course, where this blog is concerned, “screw the reader” may end up meaning “screw exactly one reader” (sorry Mom). That has not stopped me from adopting “screw the reader” as my mantra. (It is not, however, the mission statement of this blog, which is “albertnet — increasing shareholder value since 1969!”)

Why write a sonnet?

Before I get to the actual instruction, I’ll give you one good reason to learn how to write a sonnet: it’s the feeling you get when you’re done. What is that feeling? Well, have you ever been walking along the sidewalk, minding your own business, when suddenly you see somebody up ahead of you, running in your direction as fast as he can, trying to catch a bus or make some appointment, and you get this temptation, as he rushes past, to stick your foot out and trip him? Your only motive would be the pure spectacle of this person flying through the air, then crashing hard onto the ground, and picking himself up in a state of shock and bewilderment.

Think of it: one second the guy would be in a full run, his thoughts only on his bus or appointment, and then in a split second everything would change. He’d be as stunned by the sudden shift of circumstance as by your total lack of apparent motive. Then, of course, you’d have a serious problem on your hands, especially if he were a big guy with a hot temper, but never mind that—I’m talking about that brief period when you have arbitrarily seized control of the innocent fellow’s life. Exhilarating. Of course you would never act on this impulse, just as I wouldn’t; oddly enough, it turns out the best we can do in achieving that exhilaration is to write a sonnet.

You may be extremely skeptical of this assertion, and rightfully so. But how will you ever know if I’m right or not? After all, I’ve written sonnets (for example, this one), and you haven’t. (If you had, you wouldn’t be reading this post; you’d be doing something more fun.) The only way you’ll ever know if a sonnet can really give you this feeling is to try writing one yourself. Fear not: it’s really not that hard.

What is a sonnet?

You probably think of a sonnet as a dreary little poem such as what crusty old English poets used to write centuries ago. (As Lou Reed has sung, “The poets studied rules of verse/ And the ladies, they rolled their eyes.”) What you might not know is that the sonnet is a classic form that, though used heavily by Shakespeare, was developed centuries before his time by Italians. Yes, Italians—as in pasta, Armani, and Ferraris. Writing sonnets is not the exclusive activity of those trapped indoors by foul weather.

There was some minor tweaking of the sonnet form over time, particularly with the rhyme scheme. In this post I’m going to focus on the Shakespearean sonnet, which is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, where the first dozen lines follow an ABAB rhyme scheme and the last two lines comprise a rhyming couplet. I’ll define each of these terms, teach you how to master them, and whether you end up writing a sonnet or not you’ll be that much more impressive at cocktail parties.

What is iambic pentameter?

Iambic refers to the inflection of words in a sonnet, which creates the rhythm of the poem and makes it so much fun to read. Meter refers to the length of the lines, which in turn dictates how much rhyme there will be. (Thanks to people like e.e. cummings, modern verse is just a tossed salad of words, so we must turn to rap music, or write our own sonnets, if we want consistent rhythm and rhyme.)

Each line of a sonnet is written in iambic pentameter (as are most of the lines in a Shakespeare play, except those spoken by lesser characters like servants). I’ll get to “iambic” in a minute, but first let's look at meter. The meter of a poem is expressed as the number of “feet” in a line. “Pentameter” simply means each line has five feet. As with humans, the size of the feet will vary from style to style. The good news is, within a sonnet each foot is the same size: it’s always two syllables. Thus, a line of iambic pentameter verse always has exactly ten syllables.

With two-syllable words, there are just two kinds of foot: the iamb and the trochee.

An iamb is simply a pair of syllables with the emphasis on the second syllable. (If you don’t know what a syllable is, you’re in the wrong blog—click here.) The following words are iambs (that is, they’re iambic): alas, belong, create, delight, excite, festoon, galore, harangue, incite, jejune, Kinkade, liaise, mature. The word “iambic” is simply the adjective form of “iamb,” meaning “consisting of or characterized by iambs.”

The following words are not iambs, but their opposite, the trochee: nature, open, pious, quickly, rotgut, sicken, trickle, uncle, Vanya, whiskey, X-ray, yuppie, Zeitgeist. (Perhaps italics will help: consider “alas, belong, create” vs. “nature, open, and pious.”) The adjective form of “trochee” is “trochaic.”

So do we totally avoid trochees in a sonnet? No: you can achieve an iambic rhythm with non-iambic words, so long as you place them correctly within the line. A bit ago I gave a number of examples of trochaic words; in the lines below I’ve arranged these words so as to achieve an iambic rhythm:

ooooThe yuppie Zeitgeist sickens Uncle Ralph,

ooooSo quickly trickle rotgut whiskey, man!

Note that I had to start and end each line with a one-syllable word, so the rhythm wouldn’t be out of phase—that is, so the lines wouldn’t be trochaic. If you start a line of a sonnet with a trochee, the rhythm will be all messed up.

Conversely, iambic words work great in a sonnet, so long as you start and end the line with the iambic word instead of with a one-syllable word:

ooooAlas, Kinkade festoons jejune delights;

ooooMature beliefs incite harangues galore.

I didn’t bother italicizing anything in those last two lines, because you’re doubtless getting the hang of it by now and no longer need the italics. The natural inflection of the words—that is to say, the succession of iambs—naturally creates the desired rhythm. I think it’s almost impossible to read those lines without getting that duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA effect that is the hallmark of a sonnet and the most basic definition of iambic pentameter.

Watch out for sequences of one-syllable words. In high school I was given an assignment to write a poem in dactylic trimeter. I won’t bother you with what “dactylic trimeter” means other than to say I was daunted by the assignment and, thinking myself a sneaky little bastard, wrote the entire poem using one-syllable words. I thought this would make it impossible to screw up the meter, but I was wrong. As it turns out, the inflection of a pair or sequence of one-syllable words is not always arbitrary. To put it more simply, people put the emphasis on one word or another in many two-word phrases.

For some reason, I can’t think of a single pair of one-syllable words that is iambic, but I can easily come up with examples of two-word phrases that are trochaic. For example, consider “boy scout.” Most people will accentuate the first word: “boy scout.” (When I was a kid, my dad always said “boy scout,” which perplexed me. Maybe he was emphasizing the scout part, it being more impressive.) Other examples of trochaic phrases: “hot dog,” “pit bull,” “big time,” “trash can.” If you defy the natural inflection of such phrases your rhythm will be off. Here is an example of right vs. wrong:

Right:

ooooA hot dog makes a pit bull want to eat,

ooooSo put the trash can lid on good and tight.

Wrong:

ooooHot dogs are bad for foraging pit bulls;

ooooAnd so trash can lids should be put on tight.

In the “right” example, you naturally place the inflection on the syllables that I’ve italicized. But in the “wrong” example, if you try to read the lines according to my italics (i.e., to try to adhere to the iambic convention), you have to fight what comes naturally, and the end result just sounds wrong. (It’s worth pointing out, I think, that some words, like “foraging,” simply won't work in a sonnet. Any word that has a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables is incompatible with the iambic structure.)

A final note: in a real sonnet, you will invariably have a mixture of one-syllable words, two-syllable words that are iambs, two syllable words that are trochees, and words with more than two syllables. All are okay, as long as they’re arranged in such a way that the natural inflection supports the rhythm of the poem. For example:

ooooThe yuppie Zeitgeist sickens Auntie Grace,

ooooAnd yet she likes her creature comforts, too.

ooooExquisite and expensive are her tastes;

ooooVelveeta’s cheap, but not her precious bleu.

As shown by this example, iambs can span a pair of words. “Velveeta” is neither an iamb nor a trochee, being three syllables, but “Velveeta’s cheap” produces a pair of iambs. (In case you were wondering, I don’t actually have an Auntie Grace, and if I did, I wouldn’t call her “Auntie” unless I had to.)

What is pentameter?

The pentameter part is much simpler, of course. You just count the feet (i.e., the iambs) and make sure there are five per line. Count on your fingers if you have to; I often do. (Now you know what that weirdo was doing on Bart, scrawling in a notebook and periodically watching his fingers extend, one by one, lips silently mouthing “one, two, three…”)

As simple as this pentameter business is, I’ll give some examples anyway:

Right:

ooooCan I compare you to a slimy slug? (Ten syllables total; five feet)

Wrong:

ooooCan I compare you to a slug? (Eight syllables; four feet)

ooooCan I compare you to a pit bull? (Nine and a half syllables ; four and a half feet)

Oddly enough, one of the most famous lines of Shakespeare’s verse violates the relatively simple pentameter rule:

ooooTo be or not to be, that is the question.

Check it out: he’s got an extra half-foot on there! Sloppy work by the master? Of course not. This is, as they say, “the exception that proves the rule.” By screwing up the meter, Shakespeare causes the reader and/or theater audience to stumble. Normally you don’t want anybody to stumble, but in this case Shakespeare wants to give you pause, so you’ll consider the word “question,” which in the context of existence is the whole point of the soliloquy. (Not that you should feel free to deliberately screw up the meter in your sonnet, at least until you’ve achieved Shakespeare’s mastery of the form.)

What is an ABAB rhyme scheme?

ABAB is, of course, a misspelling of “ABBA,” the Swedish rock band that invented the rhyme scheme later adopted by Shakespeare. Okay, that’s false. What “ABAB” means is that the third line (that is, the last word in the third line) rhymes with the first line (that is, the last word in the first line), and the fourth line rhymes with the second line. In my four-line example above, “tastes” rhymes (more or less) with “Grace,” and “bleu” rhymes (more or less) with “too.” In other words, “tastes” and “Grace” are represented by the letter A, and “bleu” and “too” are represented by the letter B, in our “ABAB” classification.

Actually, ABAB is just shorthand: in a full-length sonnet, the first twelve lines rhyme in an ABABCDCDEFEF scheme. That is, after the first four lines, you start over, so the fifth line doesn’t rhyme with anything and neither does the sixth. The seventh line rhymes with the fifth, and the eighth line rhymes with the sixth. Then you start over again. Here’s an example, with a letter assigned to the final sound of each line:

ooooCan I compare you to a slimy slug? (A)

ooooNo way—compared to you, a slug is gross! (B)

ooooIn fact, you put to shame ‘most any bug; (A)

ooooThe caterpillar isn’t even close. (B)

ooooOn you I think I’d rather fix my gaze (C)

ooooThan on a snake that’s flattened on the road. (D)

ooooI'd rather hold your hand, it’s safe to say, (C)

ooooThan stroke the skin of any horny toad. (D)

ooooAnd anyway, I’d choose to dine with you, (E)

ooooIf going hungry were my other choice. (F)

ooooI wouldn’t mind conversing with you, too, (E)

ooooIf forced to otherwise give up my voice. (F)

The final two lines of the sonnet are called a “rhyming couplet,” which is a fancy way of saying “two lines in a row that rhyme.” This is represented as “GG,” and here’s an example:

ooooooooSo just relax and feel real glad (G)

ooooooooThat I don’t think you’re really all that bad. (G)

The rhyming couplet is often indented a bit (as above), and it is often used to summarize the rest of the sonnet, or deliver the conclusion that the other lines were suggesting. The overall rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet is ABABCDCDEFEFGG.

Exercises

I recognize that this is a lot to grasp, so to give you some practice, here are some multiple-choice quizzes. These should help train you on the concepts of iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme of a sonnet. Answers to these exercise come at the end.

1.o Which if these is/are an iamb?

a. Dana

b. Lindsay

c. Both

d. Neither

2.o Which of these is/are an iamb?

a. Grotesque

b. Yucky

c. Both

d. Neither

3.o Which of these is/are an iamb?

a. Hors-d’oeuvre

b. Nibble

c. Both

d. Neither

4.o Which of these is/are proper iambic pentameter?

a. Whoever stole my poncho’s gonna pay.

b. I’m gonna find whoever stole my coat.

c. Both

d. Neither

5.o Which of these is/are proper iambic pentameter?

a. His blood pressure is getting higher now.

b. There’s nothing like a taqueria there.

c. Both

d. Neither

6.o Which of these is/are proper iambic pentameter?

a. I see you in the classroom every day

b. I satisfy myself with frequent looks

c. Both

d. Neither

7.o Which of these is/are proper iambic pentameter?

a. I’ll lie, I’ll steal, just to make a buck or two

b. I used to be a kid of high ideals

c. Both

d. Neither

8.o Which of these is proper iambic pentameter?

a. Relief is the only thing on your mind

b. Relief’s the only thing that’s on your mind

c. Relief’s the sole thing on your mind, buddy

d. None of the above

9.o Consider the following lines:

Alas, Kinkade festoons jejune delights;

Mature beliefs incite harangues galore.

ooooooWhich line should come next, to follow the rhyme scheme?

a. His hackneyed style’s something I abhor

b. There’s something evil in his cloying scenes

c. My eight-year-old’s got better taste than that

d. Those cozy backlit houses: fricking trite!

10.o Consider the following lines:

The yuppie Zeitgeist sickens Uncle Bob,

So quickly trickle rotgut whiskey, man!

ooooooWhich line should come next, to follow the rhyme scheme?

a. Inebriation topples every caste

b. And yet he’s quite the de la Renta fan

c. He won’t forgive a Prada-wearing snob

d. Unless he’s drunk enough to lighten up

Answers to exercises

1. d

2. a

3. a

4. c

5. b

6. c

7. b

8. b

9. d

10. c

Final considerations

Of course there’s more to fine poetry than meter and rhyme. Alliteration uses similar consonant sounds to assist sentences in sizzling. Assonance hones the sonorous flow with close vowel sounds pouring forth. Hyperbole is the best device on the fricking planet for achieving emphasis. Synecdoche is powerful in the right hands; for example, the White House is using it to good effect these days. As for onomatopoeia, even just murmuring a phrase or two of it can cause a lot of buzz, and just spelling the word correctly can earn you an honorary degree from a polytechnic university. Stuff your sonnet full of these devices and you’ve got a splendid poetic calzone on your hands. (Stunning insights, vivid sensory descriptions, deep metaphysical contemplation, and lofty subject matter sure couldn’t hurt, either.)

So, suppose you’ve just written your first sonnet, and experienced none of the exhilaration I promised earlier in this post? Perhaps you’re just not doing it right. Go try it again, but this time with feeling.

I guess that’s it—my lesson is complete. But wait, there’s one more thing, lest I forget: feel free to send your sonnet on to me. I’d like to post your work on albertnet!

Addendum

For Christmas, my daughter Alexa (who read this post and passed the quiz) wrote a sonnet each for my wife and me. Here is the one she wrote for me.

oooooooooFor Daddy

If I could make a wish I’d wish to fly,

Up high I’d soar with birds up in the air.

If only it was true I’d start to cry,

I wonder what I’d give to be up there.

If I could make a wish I’d wish to soar

Or maybe just to fly a little bit

And now I think about it, life’s a bore.

But that’s not an excuse to throw a fit.

If I could make a wish I’d wish to glide,

To spread my arms and take off from the ground.

In one smooth motion I would be outside

To leave my room without making a sound.

ooooI think my family has that dream as well.

ooooIf it came true that would be really swell.