Pavlov's Lapdog

A friend used to make fun of me for still calling that post-shampoo treatment "creme rinse." “It’s different now,” she assured me. “It’s conditioner.” It took me almost twelve more years to believe her. Maybe that’s because it took my hair twelve more years to get into condition.

I was an Eskimo right out of the womb, hair sticking out every which way. My mother used to hide my face in a blanket so people wouldn’t ask what I was. In all my school pictures, I had crappy hair—wiry, unruly, cowlicks in my bangs, frizz. All of my teenage years were awkward ones. Prior to graduation, I could’ve been voted “Most Likely to Have a Bad Hair Day.”

But now my hair is conditioned. It’s used to my treatment, my application of creamy potions to its shafts, my pulling straight the strands with a vent brush, my subjecting it to a heat so high it smokes. And it rewards me daily with good behavior—soft locks, shiny tresses. It does what I tell it, stays where I put it, even, it seems, holds up in the rain, when everyone else’s hair either crimps or falls limp.

Of course, this is only a slightly different kind of conditioning from that which made Pavlov’s dogs slobber. My dog, Chance, is conditioned this old-fashioned way. No doubt the starvation he suffered in the first year of his life is responsible for the whimpering and whining and jumping that occurs the moment he returns from his afternoon walk. My husband takes the metal can, in which is hidden the kibble, from the top of the fridge, and the puddle appears, magically, under the dog, a trail of viscous drool leading back to his jowls.

We are all conditioned this way. We know from experience what action will produce what reaction. We each respond to various stimuli with “psychic secretions.” (The mere smell of cake, for instance, gives me an orgasm, though I believe that’s a physical secretion.) Here is all the evidence I need that the mind and body are united. I have heard champions of the mind-body split, but they might as well belong to the Flat Earth Society. The mind and the body are interdependent. (The hair, however, is independent.)

In What the Bleep do We Know?, a movie described by many, probably aptly, as “new-age hooey,” we are introduced to the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto. Emoto studied the messages from water by photographing water crystals under various spells. For instance, some drops were prayed for by priests; some where serenaded by Vivaldi and Mozart; others were given labels such as “love and gratitude.” The crystals are beautiful, like snowflakes. You look at their purity and intricacy and believe, instantly, in the higher power that lurks in your own mind. The angels sing in harmony. But one sample of water, labeled, “you make me sick,” is brown and murky—a water you wouldn’t want to even think exists, much less drink. You’re sad for that water.

At that moment in the movie, a stranger walks up to star Marlee Matlin and says, “If a thought could do that to water, imagine what a thought could do to you.” New-age hooey or not, it’s a powerful line. Our negative thoughts rule our lives. They condition our responses. They set us up for every failure.

Of course, those negative thoughts must come from our bad experiences.

I need to lose weight. I have given up carbs and counted calories and exercised aerobically. I have lifted weights. Right now, though, my body seems done with me. It won’t respond. My muscles don’t build, my arms don’t tone, my fat don’t thin. Could be hormones. Could be thyroid. Could be conditioning. I’m conditioned to know that nothing I do works, and so, when the bell rings for the weight loss to begin, I see the cake, and I drool.

When I open my closet and see a wardrobe of size 6 and 8 dresses and pants that cost a mint, instead of opening the latest diet bible, counting my calories, steering clear of red light foods, I grab a jar of peanut butter. Or I dive fist first into the chocolate. I am conditioned to know they do exactly what they promise, and they do it right now.

Last week, I was in it up to my elbows. In a frantic search for a chocolate stash, and in a ridiculous attempt to hide what I was doing from my own family, I reached up into the cabinet over the stove for the two-pound bag of chocolate chips. I didn’t take it down, just stuck my hand in. Five feet up, in the dark of the kitchen, while everyone was heading up to bed, my hand was buried in the bag. I ate those chocolate chips in the dark—the sweet, dark, chocolaty dark. And then, a little while later, under the guise of changing the burned out porch bulb, I ate more of them.

The next day, my love for chocolate further reinforced, I took down the bag of chips. I don’t know what I planned to do with the better part of two pounds, why a handful wouldn’t do, but it was probably a good thing I’d taken the time to pull them out of the cupboard.

Inside the school-bus-yellow bag were unrecognizable blobs of furry, chalky, white-ish clumps. I hoped it was just a fluke, that only a few of them were really like this. But no. The chips I had eaten the previous day were like creatures from a horror movie; it was as if someone had labeled them, “you make me sick.”

Did I retch from the sight of this? Nope. Was I worried about having swallowed whatever critters and beasts now crawled about what used to be Nestle’s goodness? Nuh-uh. All I cared about was that I’d have to throw away the only chocolate in the house. To tell you the truth, I even thought about turning off the lights and grabbing one last handful before the bag went into the trashcan.

Chocolate has always been good to me, but dieting has not. I know that had I been able to “eat a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and a sensible dinner,” I still wouldn’t fit into my sequined dress on Saturday night. Instead, I’ll spend a hundred bucks on a new hairdo and color. I’ll truss myself up and stuff my buns of rubber into my sister’s old size-12 black dress, then cover my sausage arms with a fancy wrap. In the end, I will be a smiling, confident, attractive, forty-two year old woman with a few good features that might overshadow the bad ones. My cleavage, for instance, is cavernous. My eyes are bright and big. My skin is clear. And my hair, well, my hair is just bitchin’.

Frankly, though, it doesn’t much matter what I look like on the outside when my thoughts are labeled “sausage arms” and “buns of rubber,” and the container that holds them is filled with brown sludge. Maybe I should serenade myself with Mozart. Maybe I should take my thoughts to a priest or rabbi for some extensive prayer. Indeed, I should tape on labels like "acceptance" and "my lovely self."

But most likely I will feed those negative thoughts some chocolate and, for a few moments before the self-loathing returns, the angels will sing.