Other people's problems get boring fast.

It's just a given that if you're human, you're going to hear about other people's problems. And other people are going to hear about yours. It's the inevitable give and take of our existences.


Life is almost never what we want it to be, and it's only natural to complain about it. We're unhappy about this or that, and we need advice or at least sympathy. Or maybe just to vent.


Your brother-in-law is having problems with your sister. She doesn't understand his need to do whatever he wants to do, whether it's hang-gliding or bowling or just drinking with his friends. She's thinking about calling an old boyfriend and wants your advice.


Or your best friend is having problems with her current squeeze: he won't commit and she's running out of time.


Or your mother isn't getting along with your step-dad and is also having kidney problems.


Or your son or daughter wants more money, even though you don't approve of his or her lifestyle and/or mate.


Or your neighbor says your dog is crapping on his lawn and wants you to do something about it.

When you get calls like these, do you pick up or (assuming you having Caller I.D.) not? Do you sometimes avoid conversations with certain people because you know they're going to say
the same old blah blah blah?

Don't feel guilty. We all have enough problems of our own -- which, if we're smart, we don't advertise too freely-- that the addition of another person's problem to ours is often more than we can handle right now, especially if it's a problem we've heard about before.

We do love our family and friends, but we hope they'll deal with most of their problems on their own without including us in the mix. As we used to say in the South, "God love 'em," meaning that we understand but can't help -- or don't want to -- and we hope God will help them because we have neither the will nor the time nor the ability to do so.

Sometimes a problem is one we haven't heard before, maybe from someone who usually doesn't call us, and we pay special attention. But if we then spend an hour on the phone empathizing and offering guidance, and if that same someone calls again a week later with the same problem, having obviously ignored everything we said the first time, an alert goes off in our brains, or should: same call, same caller, same complaint. Delete.

Complaints come in daily like low-flying aircraft, right in our faces or under the radar, surprising us or not. We have to deal with them, one by one, while still maintaining our own jobs and families and houses and dealing with our own problems. Zing zing and zing, splat splat and splat! They fly by us all the time and sometimes hit us, like bugs on the windshield that need to be cleared away so we can see the road ahead clearly. But like those bugs, most are just irritants we can usually sweep away with our wipers or our internal filters. Yes, this one has to be dealt with, and soon, that one later, another one never.


Other people's problems may initially be a real concern, since the callers sound so distraught, and we offer advice if asked to (and sometimes anyway) or more often just lend a sympathetic ear. But if the calls persist, and if the complaints are always the same, our sympathy wanes. If our advice always falls on deaf ears, we stop giving it. If the coversation is always the same, and always one-sided, we tune out. Eventually we stop picking up the phone.

Are we obligated, just by being human, to listen to other people's problems? Over and over?

If they are our friends or family members, probably yes, but only up to a point. If they are just acquaintances, probably not. In either case, there comes a time when we are allowed, I think, to start ignoring the calls and pleas. Cold, yes, but, in the end, merciful: sorry, but I can't help you. (Don't call again -- please.)

The reason other people's problems get boring so quickly is that they don't meet the following criteria: (1) they involve us, (2) they involve people we care about, (3) they come from people who truly want our advice, and (4) they're particularly interesting.

Most complaints we hear are like those of characters in the afternoon soap operas, and they deserve the same attention we'd pay to those characters in those shows. In short, my life is a mess, and do you mind if I spill it all out onto your lap? Most complainers aren't looking to you for advice; they just want someone, anyone -- you! -- to pay attention to them and their own personal miseries. They have no intention of acting on your suggestions for how they might improve their lives. You're a big fat easy ear, nothing more.

So the next time someone calls you with a personal problem, ask this: Are you going to listen to my advice? Are you ready to make a change? Or are you just unloading on me?

I suspect the complainer will (1) be incensed or (2) be made more thoughtful or (3) hang up.

There's your answer, no?

Time is a precious commodity. So is sympathy. Don't waste either one.

Be grateful for your hands.

Our two hands, working together, let us applaud something we enjoy. They also help us steer our cars and ride our bikes and lift stuff. They let us shake hands while patting someone on the back. They are mirror images of each other, twins. It's hard to imagine not having two hands.

Our hands are, for the most part, dominant on one side or the other, which to me is a mystery. We're either right-handed or left-handed. Why don't we have equal strength in each hand? What is nature trying to tell us? I don't know, but it's true. (I've known a few ambi-dextrous people, but they were few and far between.)

Our two hands are like our two eyes, helping us focus and take care of the task at hand. But when one hand is rendered useless, or is missing, what does that do to our lives? And to our brain, which has to make the adjustment? Does the remaining hand get stronger? At what point do we stop reaching for things -- hands, bottles, whatever -- with the missing hand?

Lots of people in Africa have had their hands lopped off by mis-guided rebels with machetes. And lots of our own soldiers are coming home from wars without a hand, usually the results of explosions. How do they cope? How do we teach them to cope?

How do we show them how to teach their kids to catch a ball when the old dictum is to "use two hands"? How can they demonstrate for their kids a two-hand shot at the basket? How can they,
just for themselves, play golf?

We humans seem to be given things in ones or twos. (Never threes, at least not that I can think of.) One brain but two hands. One heart but two lungs. One liver but two kidneys. One prostate but two ovaries. One pancreas but two what? Hmmm . . .

If we have to give up a lung or a kidney, anything we have two of, we can survive. We will have to endure the trauma of surgery -- being cut open -- and, in our recovery, have to limit our activities. But we'll pull through. And maybe not even notice our loss. A lung, yeah, but not necessarily a kidney.

The reason we're willing to undergo that surgery, that invasion of our bodies, for a loved one -- or even, I've heard, for a stranger -- is because we know we have a spare part. We really can live a more or less normal life with one kidney or lung or ovary or testicle or whatever.

But it's also because those organs are buried inside us, so we don't notice when one is missing -- after the scars have healed -- and neither does anyone esle. No one ever stops you in the grocery story and says, "Oh my, I didn't realize you were missing a kidney. What happened?"
You can donate some parts of you without calling attention to yourself, and if you do, I say God bless you. What a brave person you are -- really!

But would you donate a hand?

If you knew that your hand would help a loved one with one hand or maybe none, would you?

To reiterate, when you're missing a kidney or a kneecap or an ovary, nobody knows. But if you're missing a hand, everyone notices. I once knew a boy whose hand had been blown off in a fireworks explosion and who had a fake one that was crafted out of some kind of rubber and looked sort of like a real one and that he could fit onto his wrist to poke out of his long sleeve sort of like the real thing. It was useless, though, purely cosmetic -- not like the amazing devices now available -- and after a few months, he threw it away and just let his scarred stump poke out. Like lots of men with stick-on hairpieces, he decided it wasn't worth the hassle and the discomfort.

But because our hands do like each other, are twins, working together to accomplish so many of the trivial and important jobs we do every day, not having one has to be a bummer. Getting used to doing things one-handed can't be fun. How do you hold your lover's face in your hands if you only have one? How do you pick up your little kid with just one hand? How do you clasp them in prayer when there's nothing for the other one to clasp?

And if you're miserable, what is the sound of one hand wringing?

But people do cope every day with having lost a hand. There was once a pro baseball player with one hand. A pitcher. He just shifted his glove to the other hand after every pitch, in case he had to field a ground ball. Bob Dole lost the use of one hand in WW2 and spent his career in politics holding a pencil in his dead hand to keep anyone from trying to shake it. We humans are remarkably adaptive. We know how to compensate.

Treasure your hands. Take care of them. Pay them attention. Exercise them. Make them work. Oil them down. Give them time together just for the pleasure of it. They really do like each other. I think all twins do.

Be thankful you have them and gracious toward those who don't.

Don't get rid of all the nukes.

No one who has seen the destruction that a nuclear bomb inflicted on Japanese cities toward the end of World War Two can forget it. Something new and terrifying had been unleashed on the world. On the innocent and guilty alike. The genie was out of the bottle. Pandora's box had been opened. A demon was loose.


For the first time, obliteration was possible on a global scale. A single bomb could blow away most of a big city and leave the rest of it in such a state that life as usual was impossible.

Flesh was peeled from bones, and radioactive fall-out polluted generations to come. It was a terrible thing, violence on a scale the world had never seen.

Still, Japan didn't surrender, even after the emperor had seen armageddon in his own country. So a second bomb was dropped, and the devastation was almost the same. Thousands of ordinary citizens combusted, dying agonizing deaths. Japan finally gave up.


There have only been two nuclear bombs dropped in warfare, and the United States dropped both.


No one except extreme idealogists wants to see a third one detonated.

To this day, all the nations of the world are very worried about it happening again. In the old days -- the Fifties, even the Sixties -- only the U.S. and Russia had such bombs. Nowadays, there are a number of countries who have them, including India and Pakistan and Israel and France and England and others. We're all sitting, literally, on time-bombs.


The big fear is not that one of those countries will drop it on another -- although it's possible -- but that some renegrade countries who don't agree to play by the rules may discover the complicated recipe for making such bombs and will begin producing them, as Iran and North Korea appear to be doing now. But an even bigger fear is terrorist groups. The smallest of such nuclear devices, bought ready-made from one of those renegade countries, carried in a briefcase by someone who didn't set off airport security, might blow to smithereens The Metropolitan Museum of Art and all its treasures. Or an airport terminal and everyone in it. Maybe a whole airport. A big bridge. A stadium full of our fellow citizens. Trying to keep nuclear bombs and the accomanying technology out of the hands of crazy people is probably the greatest challenge we humans will have to deal with going forward.


So do we try to rid the world of them?

Nice idea, but too late. The technology is out there. We can't put the evils back in the box.

All we can do is keep more for ourselves in what we consider intelligent countries than we think the crazies -- countries or individuals -- have. The mere threat of mutual nuclear destruction will probably deter most governments from launching any such weapons. But it won't keep the suidical lunatic from doing so.

Regrettably, we can't get rid of all nukes. Sorry, but I think we created a dragon that we keep caged and have to keep feeding because we know there are other dragons just like him in cages around the world -- cages maybe not as secure as ours.

It's our curse that we developed a weapon that could destroy cities. The early scientists who helped make it understood and warned against its use. They knew that, once unleashed, it would be hard to control. Einstein knew it. So did Teller. So did lots of others. We needed it at the time to defeat Japan -- and it worked -- but now we're trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Pretend we didn't invent it. Is it possible to un-think something?

Wishful thinking. It's what we humans are all about.

Here's what to do with men's colognes.

Men of a certain age have accumulated lots of bottles of colognes, either because we thought we needed to smell better back when we were dating, or, more likely, because our loved ones couldn't think of anything else to give us for birthday or Father's Day or anniversary. Men are notoriously hard to buy for, so the easy out -- for the women in our lives-- is to buy us a fragrance that they can stand on us.

That rationale has left lots of guys with scents we'll never use again. Hey, we're not dating anymore, so why all this smelly stuff? Guys really aren't into dabbing a fragrance behind our ear to get a partner. That was always a girl thing, right? And did it ever work? Probably not. It was more likely that the girls of our dreams would size us up as potential partners and select us with no attention whatsover to how we smelled. (If we smelled bad, of course that was a turn-off, but if we showered every day, that was enough.)

So all those male colognes were, really, kind of a waste of time. To the women: Do you recall if your future husband smelled of this or that fragrance? I doubt it. Women are smarter than advertisers and so have always looked for men who seemed stable and affectionate and maybe family-oriented. Skeptical of drunks or poets or musicians or other un-disciplined types. Give me a man with a good job who can kiss and who showers once a day, and I'll be sort of happy.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I needed to exude a certain aroma and bought for myself the most popular fragrances -- Brut, Canoe, English Leather, Jade East, et al -- but once I'd found my mate, most of those half-empty bottles sat on a shelf in my bathroom for the next few decades. Where they rest to this day.

So what to do with all that male cologne on your shelf? If you're like me, you take the caps off and sniff them from time to time, and they really do still smell good -- and may take us back to a more innocent and more romantic time, when we were young and full of ourselves.

Okay, here's what you do. Unscrew the top of any bottle and insert a few pipe cleaners. You know what those are -- you can buy them anywhere -- and you may have used them in the past to clean out pipes you used to smoke something that was illegal. Anyway, you take a few of those and insert them into the bottle of forgotten essence and let it sit on a counter or wherever. Within not much time, the air in whatever room -- I suggest the bathroom -- will begin to smell like Jade East or English Leather or Canoe or whatever. Instant air freshener!

Try it! I have, and it works. The porous nature of the pipe cleaners will suck up the liquid and disperse it into the air, not all at once but gradually, subtly. Sort of like the perfumed things women often put into their drawers. No big surprise: they knew about this before we did. But it does work, so try it. Put those male pheronomes (if they really exist) to good use. Secret an old bottle of Brut with a pipe cleaner in it under the bed and see if it unleashes your mate's primal instincts. Probably not, but what do you have to lose?

I'm into re-cycling, and I can't think of a better way to get rid of all that really nice-smelling stuff we men don't want to slather onto our cheeks anymore, can you?

At the worst, it'll make your house smell better. At no cost. And it might do even more.