Binary thoughts

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
March 28, 2007

I’ve had enough with conservatives.

We are, my friends, a people who, by our nature, think in exclusive binaries. If something is not up, it must be down; if it isn’t up or down, it’s in midair. It isn’t dark out, it’s light; dusk, depending on the viewer, is darker or lighter, but rarely both in the same mind. People are fat or thin, tall or short, nice or mean, funny or boring. A meal is cold or hot, a dance or a date the same, as well as a party or drink. My dog is sleeping or awake, with sleep being the opposite of awake and awake the opposite of asleep. Love is the absence of hate, hate the absence of love; people are sick if they lack health and healthy if they aren’t sick. “He’s not great at it,” is the same as saying, “He’s awful,” a rhetorical device made possible only by a binary-thinking person’s sense of dramatic irony. I am, or I am not; classes are empty or full, the minds of the students as well, and my car is always a useless piece of junk, but that’s neither here nor there.

One such binary, and the subject of this week’s Commentary Magazine, is long vs. short. Having considerable experience as a human operating under the duality of thought, I have, over the years, plugged into several situations in which I’ve imposed the binary system and come out with a series of preferences in said situations. This article, as it were, strives to explain my preferences, and perhaps lure you over toward my side of the binary.

Recently, I’ve had to have my hair cut for the Masque’s next production, The Philadelphia Story. As it turns out, older gentlemen in the 1930s didn’t sport luxuriously long locks like the hair I’d been growing since July 2006. Wet, it was down my neck. Dry, it was curly and Byronic and dark, and truly, I loved it. However, since Spring Break, when I lost my mane to the barber shop floor, I’ve been able to feel the cold damp creeping around my neck, and the brutal March snow clings to my scalp. When I had long hair, it was like I was wearing a natural head blanket, keeping my brains warm and preventing real brain freeze. But now, my cranium is subject to iciness, and the world is colder. Long vs. short hair: long wins.

In my experience, a person can physically sit and pay attention for, at most, 70 minutes. For 70 minutes, a person can make an excellent effort towards apprehension, comprehension and retention. There might be some kind of study somewhere confirming this, I don’t really know—but if I may permit myself to subscribe to the researcher’s fallacy, I will pretend that everyone out there is precisely like me and has an attention span of about 70 minutes. And yet, semester after semester, I find myself being coerced by a coalition of the English Department and the Honors Program into taking night classes, which—that’s right, folks—are three hours long. Now, most professors are keen observers of the Costello condition and give breaks of varying lengths about 70 minutes in, but 10 or five minutes isn’t nearly long enough to recharge the batteries. Back when I was a freshman, however, I had no classes over an hour long—the standard 50-minute block. For those, I am on my game—each class offers you a morsel of knowledge that you assemble at exam time. Due to my academic attention span, in the case of long vs. short classes, short wins out.

The people who work at my bank are nice enough, I suppose. They have that world-weary look common amongst those who put in an honest day’s work for their daily bread. Having worked in customer service jobs myself, I understand and accept the reluctance my tellers have to help me—were I in their shoes, I wouldn’t want to help anyone either. This pity, then, lends toward my preferring decidedly short trips to the bank. Combine that with my bank’s tendency to misplace my money and then charge me overdraft fees based on its mistakes, which results in three-hour visits with harried managers who keep uttering profanities while asking whose fault the accidental theft of my $5 was, and yes, my friends, I most definitely prefer short trips to the bank.

In these instances, then, the tendency towards binary thought showcases itself. Good or bad, we either think in this way or we don’t—and that’s something I’d swear to (or maybe not...). Binary thought is everywhere and nowhere, on and off this page; the best we can do is to recognize it, and make the right (or wrong?) choices.

costellom4@lasalle.edu