From Seems to Fit, Chapter 23(ish):
Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. She loved the way it made men’s heads swivel in a restaurant or crowded train, looking for the source of sudden brooksound. This laugh always caught even her by surprise, the first blurt and the ripple of voice and breath which followed quickly on its heels: it felt like a rabble of schoolkids at recess, chasing after and tumbling over one another.
But she also knew the trouble which could follow when that laugh emerged at a moment not funny at all to those around her, to men especially, no matter how deeply ridiculous the moment (and the seriousness with which men regarded it) might be.
How different are men and women? And what, exactly — even approximately — takes place at the vertices where they bump into one another?
I’m not talking physical vertices, of course. (This isn’t that sort of blog.) It’s like… Well, a couple years ago I devoted a blog post to the importance of edges: those (sometimes invisible) lines where two disparate things meet. In simplest geometric terms, an edge occurs where one two-dimensional plane intersects another. (In order to intersect at all, the two planes must “differ” in at least one respect: their angles in space.)
But all kinds of things scrape up against all kinds of other things. The taste of one cupcake ingredient juxtaposed with another. The sound of a musical note against a silence. Countries. Cultures. Ideas.
Are you familiar with the word frotteur? It comes from the French word frottage, rubbing, and is a term applied to someone who derives physical — often sexual — pleasure from rubbing against someone else. While the pleasure isn’t physical (I’m not that far gone), I sometimes think of myself as a frotteur of ideas and facts.
So what the heck is it, exactly, that happens in that narrow, narrow, quark-wide little gap where men and women intersect? Is it a “war”? Is it even friction? Is it even confusion?
(In what follows, please understand that I’m certainly not ignorant of extreme cases — relationships of brutal violence, physical or otherwise, or weird power trips and perversions. I’m just not talking of them for now. I’m talking of “normal” relationships — whatever the hell that means.)
You may remember the post here from back in early October, Is It Love? (Local Edition), which in turn sprang from a post over at The Burrow, home of RAMH regular “Ashleigh Burrows” (“a/b,” as she styles herself in the comments). That first got me thinking about this topic.
Then, a few weeks ago, I encountered a post over at the new(ish) blog by the new(ish) RAMH regular who identifies herself here as “whaddayamean.” (That nickname comes from the unlikely-to-be-claimed-by-anyone-else-ever name of the blog itself: Whaddaya mean, do I have room for dessert?) In that post, Wym (as I will call her for now) described something she’d been puzzling over, regarding her significant other, “F.” Please read this mindful that Wym is, as they say (or used to), a sharp cookie, with a dry, dry sense of humor, and is likely fully aware that F himself might read her post; you can hear sly laughter scattered here and there (but not everywhere) among her words:
Would any real father tell his son to be forthright about his affections? I mean, I wish they did. But in my experience, men survive — and avoid getting screwed over — by keeping their cards as close to the vest as possible, keeping their woman under a pall of nagging uncertainty in the relationship, thereby earning her desperate sense of relief when they “come round” to settling down. I mean, haven’t we all seen kinda a lot of that?
On the other hand, F — who does not support my taste in music, for reasons I find stupid and closeminded, but that is neither here nor there — is a great practitioner of the [hypothetical aforementioned] father’s advice (as opposed to his own father’s advice, which was “make sure you meet her mother, so you can see what she’s going to look like in 35 years before you decide if you want to get involved”). F is very demonstrative and uses well-timed reminders of his affection to (manipulatively) end “discussions” and bad moods.
What is going on, anyhow, at the edge where men (as Wym understands them) and women (ditto) intersect? Is it typical?
H.L. Mencken took the received wisdom of his time — that men were cold-blooded realists, and women silly, sentimental ditzes — and stood it on its head. The following appears in his looong essay, “In Defense of Women.” This passage, from the Introduction, always struck me as especially wise:
Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge… Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him.
Now, Mencken was a bit of the blowhard which he often professed to dislike. He also packaged this argument in a pretty but poisonous wrapping paper — denying to women not just the faults but the virtues normally (by men!) ascribed to them. But I still remember the shock of reading passages like this in Mencken’s essay.
It was a shock of recognition. In a comment on someone’s blog in the last few months, I mentioned a theory I’d developed as a boy, one which I could never disprove for reasons which will become obvious when I relate the theory to you. It went like this:
Women can read men’s minds.
A boy — a man — can pretty much drive himself crazy once he starts to entertain this line of thinking. Evidence of it seemed to be everywhere. Even claims of not understanding men (as in Wym’s blog post) sounded hollow when filtered through the fuzzbox of this theory: such claims were obvious camouflage, like the scraps of aluminum foil thrown out of World War II bombers to confuse the enemy’s radar.
And yet, if women could read men’s minds, couldn’t they hear me clinging to this theory in noisy desperation, like a man holding onto scraps of a lifeboat destroyed in a typhoon, and screaming into the wind?
The conclusion was inescapable: whether or not women really could read men’s minds, it didn’t make any difference because they behaved as if they could. For me, that always defined what went on in the gap between men and women: women got it, instinctively or telepathically, no difference; and men did not get it.
And yes, even now, you women reading this: I know you’re running off to your little enclaves, entry barred to anyone with a Y chromosome. Running off and laughing among yourselves. I know you.
________________
P.S. You might wonder, by the way, why or how a boy could develop such a theory. My only answer would be to point you to my remarkable mother and sisters, or most recently to The Missus, and raise a quizzical eyebrow. Not that my dad or brother were ever slouches in the brains department. But they weren’t scarily smart.
whaddayamean says
I know I should probably try to respond thoughtfully, but I’m just laughing too hard right now.
John says
wym: …and somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.
whaddayamean says
wait, so you knew i was laughing?! NOW WHO’S READING MINDS?!
John says
whaddayamean: Very clever, and a nice try. But I’m not buying it.
Will wait to see who else chimes in on this, thoughtfully or otherwise. Then we’ll see.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
Thanks for the shout-out,JES. I like being “a regular.” I’m looking forward to getting to know Wym, too.
As for the gap between men and women and your theory that women can read minds, I always thought it was mothers who got that skill along with those eyes in the back of their heads. If I’m looking for reasons why he doesn’t get it at all, I go to Deborah Tannen’s linguistic distinctions. I say “Wanna stop for ice cream” He says “Not really” b/c he heard the food part and not my real request to extend the evening out a little bit longer. A woman would respond “I can’t… I have to get home” or “I’ll have coffee and watch you with envy” b/c she related to the subtext.
It’s not reading minds so much as it is seeing the interstices in the conversation. And isn’t that a lovely word?!
a/b
marta says
I’ve been rubbish at reading the male mind, and I’ve been a fool for the play-it-close-to-the-vest-and-keep-her-guessing. I rarely guessed correctly. Oh my gosh, I do not have room in any comment box for all that I’m thinking. But perhaps right now the only time I got it really right when I was trying to know what a man was thinking was when I figured out he was not thinking about me.
Oh wait. I’m a pretty good guess when the man is thinking something along the lines of damn-she-is-tall-and-I-must-puff-myself-up-accordingly. I am a pro at reading that one.
hmmm.
Froog says
Well, of course science fiction has exhaustively analysed the problems implicit in being able to read minds, chief of which is that – unless you’re able to selectively fine-tune it, to do it completely at will – it’s more of a curse than a blessing; you find yourself overwhelmed, driven crazy by relentless ‘white noise’ that’s too multifarious for you to process…. it leaves you no room for your own thoughts.
Then again, if – as both women and men regularly suggest – the genders have a fundamental difficulty in understanding each other, it wouldn’t much matter if women can read men’s minds or not: they’ll still be baffled by what they find in there.
A male friend was saying to me just the other day that the answer that most seems to irritate women when they pose their dreaded “What are you thinking about?” question is “Nothing.” Oh, they’re probably just fishing for a compliment, or simply trying to initiate a conversation, and are irritated by our literal-minded failure to play along. Or perhaps they suspect us of some evasion in saying this – what’s he trying to hide? They do regularly seem very reluctant to believe that this is an honestly meant answer, they seem to find it incomprehensible that we really do spend much of the time thinking about nothing much at all – or nothing very choate, anyway.
I suspect that the ‘uncanny ability’ which haunts your conspiracy-theorising mind, John, is no more than what the boffins these days call EQ. Women are often better at intuitively appraising the emotional states of others. And perhaps, also, they devote more attention, as Ashleigh suggests, to the related skill (a bit less subconscious, more logical, I would think, but still firmly in the EQ territory of ‘different intelligence’, ‘people skills’) of searching more deeply for subtext in people’s utterances.
whaddayamean says
@Ashleigh Burroughs – I love the ice cream story! That’s a great example.
cynth says
I thank you for the compliment and remind you that you are rather quite good at seeing things that many others of your gender do not. It is evidenced in your writing.
As a mother I felt as though I became programmed to see or hear facial expressions, body language and tone of voice more then any actual words. This has served me well with both the man I married and the subsequent lack of hearing. But it also makes me ask more often that question that Froog states we women ask (I think of it as trying to verify my impressions) . It honestly didn’t occur to me that you would have nothing on your mind, as mine is constantly filled!!
fg says
I read this through slowly as for some reason I feel there is a link in there missing or something I’m missing? Hahaha
I don’t pretend to know the answer but usually there is something that needles and has to be said. Today a number of thoughts swirling about but I am not sure which takes preference. Sorry, I think all broaden your question rather un-usefully.
I agree with Cynth. For me one of the pleasures of reading your blog is although you retain a male voice you have thought patterns that on the page allow you to throw the idea in the air to seemingly see it in-the-round. I don’t find this to be common skill and to read it is a pleasure. It has been a main reason why I have stopped reading other blogs in the past – no matter how well written – they lack this dimension.
I have wondered before whether because you, JES are from a different culture I find a refreshing sense of openness and playfulness in your thinking on here. I’m not sure. From my particular perspective, in the UK there is a common complaint that British men can’t communicate. It is the prevalent myth?/fact in my society’s understanding of itself.
Within each group – WOMAN and MAN there are a huge array of capabilities, experiences, culture and nurture. So each example pair, a man and woman, “rubbing edges” is an individual case I think. This accounts for the strange business of one pair apparently living in constant battle and later anther pair, consisting of one of the former pair, living in relative harmony.
Often it seems men are so scared by “rubbing edges” as to suppress and silence their woman in some way. To me this reinforces your H.L. Mencken quote. I think women are immensely strong. I think to be understood is to be nurtured but for some men it is to be threatened. In this sadly, the stronger women are, the more frightening they become – the beginnings of abuse behaviour.
I had a man friend who understood me like he was counting cards and I suspect, it was what he had done his whole life. At first I couldn’t put my finger – It was the oddest thing. I knew early on that we would only be friends because his interactions with me sounded a bit like… well, a film script or a radio show. Until I realised it was very curious. I supposed it was to compensate for forty or so years of confusion around women. I didn’t feel unkindly about it but it was quickly clear that he had no relation to me. At the risk of sounding patronising I then felt very sorry for him.
A scenario like this, what a man understood of my thoughts, makes me think women are really good at reading minds. But then one extreme example has limited use here.
So what I do I think about men’s thoughts?
(Like your new blog friend Wym I can feel a chuckle coming on, friendly but a little wicked.)
I think different men different dynamic and I try not to think about what they are thinking. Certainly I perceive far more than I decide it necessary to say.
I think it is true that women with children are wired to respond. My friend with a one month old can’t be woken by her husband she sleeps so soundly but if the child whimpers she is wide, wide-awake she told me last week. Although I don’t have children I think I am designed this way and show signs of this instinct.
There is a forceful need to care but I don’t think that means I should go around guessing what men think. There are plenty of things in this packed-to-the-brim world that I can thinking about instead. As an idealist I’d like them to be able to tell me when they need too. And importantly to leave them their space when they don’t need to. In reality I think female perception is powerful stuff.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
The thought that comes to my mind is – familiarity breeds perception – whether male or female. Since you and I have had the pleasure of two girls/women and a Mom that we could legitimately call “friends” from early in our lives – I think that our personal female perception signals are reasonably good relative to the male side in general. Not that I am generally ever prepared for the majority of questions/comments/interpretations that my darling spouse springs upon me regularly. It’s just that you and I seem to have less of the Venus/Mars bias that many of our male friends appear to have. Witness that I believe that you and I may actually be able to count more women as our “friends” than men. At the same time, I can perceive quite a bit more from my very “a-emotional” male biz partner of over 25 years than sometimes even his spouse can. Back in the day when I spent of hours a time every day in one woman friend’s company, we could complete one another’s sentences. Now, as the spouse has become a closer friend of her than I, I find that I’m less able to perceive the content of her mysteries. I’ve often found that the women that were most clueless to the blank slate mind of men were ones that could call very few of the opposite sex friends, too. Not sure if that’s a chicken-and-egg issue, either, but the hanging out factor with the opposite sex seems to make it less troubling at the intersections to me.
John says
Wow, you people… what great replies. You do flatter me with your attention and thoughtfulness. Thank you very much.
Now, specifically…:
John says
a/b: Mothers. Yes, I maybe should have done more than just mention my own, in passing — not just actual mothers but potential ones, just by virtue of biology. I mean, now that I’m thinking about it: there has to be something, some internal mechanism in place which prepares them for “reading” the emotional state of creatures incapable of communication, otherwise they’d be pretty sorry at the whole mothering thing. (I’m picturing a woman staring down at a cradle, asking over and over, with mounting frustration and volume, What do you WANT? Tell me, damn it! SPEAK UP!)
One typical man-woman exchange I’ve had (and heard about) goes like this:
At the same time — and I’m speaking only for myself, other guys may feel differently — I have all these expectations that a given woman shouldn’t require me to spell everything out; she should be able to somehow KNOW what I want, because isn’t it obvious?!? So, like, a little unfair and hypocritical of me.
Interstices is indeed lovely. Even if it didn’t mean anything at all, I’d love it! Edit to add: Nexus is another one, dealing with the same phenomenon.
John says
marta: I know one of the reasons I’ve gotten into trouble is, well, a lack of self-confidence, in the sense that I will not just ask Person X what s/he wants of me; it feels like an intrusion, sort of, and I feel stupid for having to ask… (This is the mirror side by the way of not TELLING someone else what I want of him/her — because “That would just be so presumptuous of me.”) So instead I guess. And I guess wrong so many times, I should be required to wear a sign which says something like, Keep Safe Distance: Likely To Step In It At Any Time.
If you’ve managed to guess right when someone of the opposite sex was not thinking about you, that puts you at least one success ahead of me. :)
John says
Froog: Ooooooh, the what-are-you-thinking game… Unless I’m actively engaged in some task, the picture I have of “where my mind is at” looks something like a very very shallow pool of water, lined with largish rocks. My mind is the water; the rocks are the things somewhere being washed by my mind at a given moment.
Then, when someone says, “What are you thinking?” or “Penny for your thoughts,” etc., suddenly one of the rocks sort of leaps up above the surface, into focus, almost always on its own. (Almost always: therein lies a whole separate conversation.) So I can answer, truthfully, “This commercial reminds me of that time when [whatever happened, happened],” or “Didja ever notice the way that [something happens]?” or even “You know what really ticks me off?” or whatever.
This resembles communication. But it’s not REAL communication, because it leaves unstated all the other things I’m thinking at the moment, and the other person (understandably) may easily take it for granted that whatever I mention is the ONLY thing I’m thinking at the moment.
EQ: one of my sisters — the one who doesn’t read blogs, let alone comment on them :) — does corporate training of one kind or another. “Emotional intelligence” (that which is theoretically measured by EQ) was for a good while her specialty; although she never told me so, I always assumed that the optimum target audience was male. But because of the “E” word, I bet most of the people who actually took the training voluntarily were women.
I don’t know many people who can use the words choate and boffins in practically the same sentence. If you’d commented anonymously I think I’d still know it was you.
John says
cynth: Thank you for the compliment in return; I will say only that perhaps you’ve overestimated my ability to add 2 and 2. :)
I have the same reticence as the man you married. Do you ever find yourself confronting a technical question — why does the computer do THAT? is it possible to do THIS on the Internet? — but you don’t bring it up to him, or me, because you know the answer will fill the air with the starling squawks of a thousand technical issues, when all you want is a single “simple” fact? Two sides of the same coin, maybe. In households where one party carries or generates more than enough emotional content to keep things on balance, sometimes volunteering any further emotional content — or even just answering when it’s requested — sometimes seems to us (well, to me) to be opening the door for a thousand squawking emotional side-issues. It seems easier to us (me) to just answer the question literally, in as few words as possible.
John says
fg: Thank you for what you said. As I mentioned to cynth, though, I urge you to be careful not to read too much what seems like my reasonableness, etc. This mind-reading stuff is tricky, even for women, when you’ve got NO non-verbal cues to go on. :)
For all the wrong reasons, I’m familiar with the calculating, games-playing mindset. (The “wrong reasons” meaning that I’ve engaged in it myself.) I’ve fancied myself smarter than women, and I’ve knowingly encouraged them to believe things which could not be true in any universe I lived in. If karma works like it’s alleged to work — at least within the span of a single lifetime — then by rights, I should probably be alone.
But I’m also conscious of my long-standing instinct for self-laceration — for calling attention to my faults, as though that somehow absolves me of them. So to counterbalance that, I freely admit that finding The Missus when I did, and working hard (almost too late) to hang onto her, was not just the luckiest thing that ever happened to me but also the smartest thing I ever did.
One of these days I’ll have to relate the story here of how I was so weirded out by girls when I was a boy that I’d actually cross the street rather than encounter them. (This presumes of course that I’ll ever be able to explain it.) (And if any of my former elementary-school girl classmates are reading this, I hope you’ll laugh and think So THAT’s what that was about! rather than Hey, saved ME the trouble…!)
John says
brudder: Unsurprisingly, we’re pretty much on the same wavelength on nearly all of this stuff. (Not that I can think of any exceptions. The “nearly” is just a CYA qualifier.)
I think I do make friends more easily with women than with men. It’s very very difficult for me to understand and “relate to” 90% of what seem to be typical male preoccupations. I don’t have much of a competitive streak, for one thing, and I’d rather watch a movie than a football game (well, most football games), and I’m fascinated by what goes on under the hood of a car but only academically, unless it’s broken down — in the same way I’m fascinated by (say) what causes kidney stones or gout, except when afflicted.
On my desk at work, I’ve got a picture of the four siblings, taken in the mid- to late 1950s. This one:
(For those of you who’ve never seen this photo, that’s me at the top — the oldest — and in clockwork fashion from there, the older sister, my kid brother — the youngest — and the younger sister.)
When I look at this picture with an outsider’s eyes, I see four smiling children. But not all four smiles are equally convincing, or so insist my insider’s eyes. The guy at the top seems to be smiling because he’s been told to, but if you shield his lower face you see a good deal of worry; his brother, too, is smiling agreeably but also (to me) seems to be saying Get me out of this precarious position between the two girls! The two girls — although each of their smiles in no way says the same thing as the other’s — seem to be really smiling.
I see this photo every day. (I’ve got another copy at home.) And every day I wonder the same things about its subjects, particularly the boys: You already sensed that the world was out of whack, didn’t you?
John says
whaddayamean: Since you kicked this whole thing off, I figured I’d offer you one last little tidbit…
When we were growing up, as the six of us sat around the dinner table, of course there was a lot of “Please pass the [random menu item]” and “Can I please have the [ditto].”
This was true of five of us, anyhow. Then there was Dad. He never asked for anything. He’d simply stare at something, say the salt — stare at it hard — and sometimes he’d just sort of radiate unspoken need. Eventually someone (usually Mom) would catch on, feel the psychological breeze (as it were) blowing from his end of the table. And then they’d pass him whatever it was, and the balance of the universe would temporarily be restored.
That little vignette, I think, pretty much sums up all that I could really say about the way men’s and women’s minds work.
Froog says
Well, it’s impressive that you’re a pool, John. I think that’s what most of the Asian religions/philosophies aim towards. I tend to visualise my mental life more as a turbid river. Occasionally there’s a leaf or a twig or something racing past that I try to attend to for a few moments, but then it’s lost in the raging eddies again.
There was a great Star Trek: Next Generation episode where Data had a fling with an attractive young Ensign. She asked him the What are you thinking? question after they kissed for the first time, and he gave the long and over-literal answer about all the calculations his computer brain had been doing about starship velocities and the death of stars and whatever… and then added at the end,“And I was also thinking about how much pressure to apply to your lips.”. She responded, somewhat bitterly, “Well, it’s nice to know I was in there somewhere.”
Childhood pictures are spooky. I looked like a Midwich Cuckoo until I was 8 or 9.
Looking at 8-year-old John…. I can’t help wondering if you’d yet heard of the Grail legend (for example).
And what’s happening with ReCaptcha at the moment? Dribeill Gereffi?! I don’t know if that’s a name or a place or an unorthodox sexual practice or what…
cynth says
Whenever I see that picture of us, I think so many things all at once! How nice that you have it at your desk in work to see us everyday.
I’ve always thought older sister was plotting how to do something to younger brother between so that he would upset the picture. And I’m smiling because someone told me to, don’t ever forget it!
And ReCaptcha says: Turnpide Best
Could there be a worst??
fg says
Just in response to the photo (I very much enjoy looking at other people’s photos):
Four of you. It is very dear that you have it on your desk and in two locations.
There are three of us (and like you guys) I can confidently say that we were adorable looking children. Three little, blond and bright things in our case.
But my poor parents could never get a good photo of the three of us together. One of the three was ALWAYS having a break down of some kind or another, especially when a camera was sighted.
So I think whoever it was that managed to round you up, in your Sunday best, brushed and washed, and managed to sit you, all FOUR, down AND persuade you to smile was doing a good job.
I think I can safely say no one managed it with us. Photographing one child at a time is much much easier.
John says
Froog: Having a turbid river in my head would drive me crazy.
Data… here y’go:
(It was a choice between that and some sort of mashup of your Simpsons-style self-portrait with a photo of a Midwich Cuckoo. Indolence won.)
I don’t think I’d become aware the Grail legend yet. Although it’s hard to be sure across that many years, the closest cultural experience I can remember to a knighthood-in-full-flower thing was Van Johnson in an adaptation of The Pied Piper, which isn’t very close.
I find reCaptcha has grown increasingly inscrutable in recent months. Maybe they’re exhausting their stock of “real words”?
John says
cynth: I’m pretty sure that description of the older sister’s frame of mind could have applied to all contexts, not just that sitting. Didn’t she audition for that movie, 40 Pounds of Trouble? That may have been the first time the adult word “understatement” made sense to me.
(Of course, the only reason it’s safe to talk like this is exactly because she is “the [sister] who doesn’t read blogs, let alone comment on them.”) (And now I’m all paranoid because this might be the first time she DOES stop in.)
John says
fg: Now you just know I’m going to ask to see a not-so-good photo of the three of you!
We were mostly agreeable kids, although the older sister managed to dig in her heels every now and then. If you’d challenged us back then to a game of Simon Says, the other three of us would probably have lost every time — why wait for this “Simon” to give us the instructions? wasn’t it enough that someone did? Meanwhile our sister would have been fighting even Simon himself, until Simon wearied and wandered off.
(The common family story is that for the first couple years after I was born, my parents thought, Well, gee — this hasn’t been as hard as we’d feared. Let’s have another! And the gods smote them in response. :))
We still tease older sister about all this stuff, in this way, but the fact is that she’s become as indispensable to our worlds as any of the rest of us.
And to bring it back to the main topic, and repeat: given both sisters and mother, and father and brother for that matter, I could not possibly think differently about women that I do.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
@John – John & Cynth: will be seeing Connie on Monday. Will be sure to refer her here, maybe on my new whiz-bang phone while commiserating with the Mays family. Anything I can add to this dialogue that would intrigue especially Mrs., Dr. Mays, too?
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
And an observation, not well researched…
I think this the largest number of comments I’ve ever noticed on one topic on this site. Si, or non?
John says
brudder: My understanding (maybe optimistic) is that Mrs. Mays occasionally visits RAMH on a stealth basis.
As for the number of comments: there’s a tweak which can be applied to a blog running this software, to display the comment count for each post in the “recent entries” box (top right). The tweak wasn’t built-in by default, but I just added it. (And while I was at it, I increased the number of entries listed there, from 12 to 15.)
Thanks for the suggestion!